Aleister Crowley Read online

  But in 1913, it began to look as if Crowley had finally solved his financial problems with the help of magic and the OTO. He was charging a fairly high sum for initiation into ‘its nine grades (£103.10s) and thirty-three guineas a year membership fee. He had also succeeded in finding a theatre to present his magical rites (the Old Tivoli) and under the name of the ‘Ragged Ragtime Girls’, they were a considerable success. There were seven girls, including Leila Waddell, and Crowley said they were three dipsomaniacs and four nymphomaniacs. In the summer of 1913, the girls were engaged by a Moscow theatre, and Crowley accompanied them. In a café he met a Hungarian girl named Anny Ringler, ‘tall, tense, lean as a starving leopardess, with wild insatiable eyes’, who had passed beyond the region where pleasure had meaning for her—Crowley means she was a masochist. Since he had a strong sadistic streak, they seemed made for one another, and they spent many idyllic hours in flogging and being flogged. It was Crowley's first experience of such a relationship, and for the next six weeks he wrote poems, plays, stories and magic rituals in a state of creative ecstasy.

  Back in England, Crowley decided it was time to make full use of his newly acquired knowledge of sex magic. For this purpose, he and Neuburg went to Paris, and prepared to begin a long series of sex-magic rituals that Crowley would later call ‘The Paris Working.’ The ‘working’ began on the last day of 1913, when Crowley ‘received the sacrament’ (performed an act of sodomy) from ‘the priest A.B.’—probably a journalist named Walter Duranty, foreign correspondent of the New York Times. Then Crowley painted a pentacle, a symbol of the god Mercury, whom they were trying to invoke, and Neuburg danced the ‘banishing ritual’, after which they invoked Thoth-Hermes (Mercury), and Crowley scourged Neuburg on the buttocks, cut a cross on the flesh over his heart, and bound a chain round his forehead. Forty minutes later, at midnight, the ceremony was concluded with an act of buggery, in which Crowley was the passive partner. Crowley records in his magical diary that he thought the room was full of snakes—symbols of Mercury, who has them entwined around his staff—while Neuburg was convinced that he was possessed by the spirit of the god. But Neuburg found it hard work, and failed to reach orgasm.

  The following day, the ritual was repeated at the same time, and this time Neuburg succeeded in achieving an orgasm, and was so completely possessed by the god that Crowley was able to ask Mercury questions about how the rite could be improved. The rituals went on until 12 February and have been described at length by Symonds and Francis King.3 At one point the god suggested that Crowley still suffered from sexual shame, and Crowley performed an act of sodomy in front of his friends at the house of his mistress Jane Cheron; his partner was Walter Duranty. One day, Neuburg became possessed by the god, and they were told that the supreme act of sex magic would consist of raping and murdering a young girl, dissecting her body into nine pieces, and offering them as sacrifices to various Greek gods. This was too much even for Crowley, and they decided to ignore it. During the thirteenth rite, the magicians had an insight into a previous life in which they had been together in ancient Crete—Crowley as a temple dancing girl and Neuburg as a young candidate for initiation; as a result of his failure to perform ritual rape on the dancing girl, both Neuburg and Crowley were sold into slavery. This revelation led Crowley to realize that he was unlucky for Neuburg; he might have gone further and reflected that he was unlucky for just about everybody he knew.

  One of the aims of the Paris Working was to obtain money for Neuburg. In this it was apparently successful—a kindly aunt provided funds; but to Crowley's disgust, Neuburg bestowed the money on ‘unworthy guests.’ In fact, Neuburg was getting sick of Crowley. Jean Overton Fuller comments in her book on Neuburg:

  He [Crowley] did physical things, homosexual practices apart, of so revolting an order that I have thought it preferable not to repeat the examples I have been given.4 [She adds:] He exploited others upon every plane, material, emotional and psychic.

  And, it seems, back in London ‘Victor was brave enough to see [Crowley]…and tell him he could go no further, and disavowed the oath he had taken at his reception into the Argentinum Astrum. Then Crowley ritually cursed him.’

  Neuburg seems to have had another reason for breaking with Crowley; he believed that Crowley had murdered his (Neuburg's) mistress, Joan Hayes. She had been recruited by Crowley in 1910 to dance in his ‘Rites of Eleusis’ at Caxton Hall, having answered an advertisement in The Stage. Rebecca West, who knew her at this period, described her as an innocent girl, ‘nice, stupid, very affected, good natured…with a tragedy ahead of her because of her ambition and her quite evident lack of gifts.’ She was the type Crowley found completely unattractive, being anything but a ‘scarlet woman.’ But she was undoubtedly Neuburg's type, and Crowley seems to have been relieved when she married a friend of Neuburg's, Wilfred Merton. But the marriage did not last; six months later, Joan Hayes—now calling herself Ione de Forest—moved into a Chelsea studio and became Neuburg's mistress. Crowley was furious; he referred to Joan as ‘Circe’, and expressed the apprehension that she would seduce Neuburg away from the magical path. Neuburg and Joan Hayes took a cottage in Essex for weekends in the summer of 1912; two months later, she shot herself. In Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley states that he ‘once found it necessary to slay a Circe who was bewitching brethren. He merely walked to the door of her room and drew an astral T (‘traditore’) and the symbol of Saturn with an astral dagger. Within forty-eight hours she shot herself.’ So it seems reasonably clear that, whether or not Crowley was responsible for her death, he certainly intended to be.

  Crowley was in Switzerland when the Great War broke out, training for another attempt on Kanchenjunga; with some difficulty he succeeded in getting back to London via Paris. There, he claims, he tried hard to get some work serving the British government—phlebitis in his left leg made it impossible to join the forces. He was told he had no qualifications, even for the censor's office, so he decided to go to America, arriving in November, 1914. The war had put an end to his income from the ‘Rites of Eleusis’, and he was soon so hard up that he was forced to send back to England for some of his rare books and manuscripts to sell to an American collector, John Quinn. In the event, Quinn bought far less than Crowley had hoped. With no friends from whom he could borrow, no faithful disciples—like Neuburg—to exploit, Crowley found himself facing real poverty.

  Before leaving England, he had started to keep a magical diary, with details of his operations of sex magic. On 3 September, he records that he possessed ‘Marie Maddingley—respectable married woman’ and adds: ‘The girl was very weak, feminine, easily excitable and very keen, it being the first time she had committed adultery.’ He records that the elixir—the mixture of male and female secretions, presumably drunk in an act of cunnilingus—was ‘first rate.’ Three days later, the partner was Peggy Marchmont, a Piccadilly prostitute, ‘a sturdy bitch of 26 or so’. It seems clear that Crowley's powers of sexual endurance were considerable, for he records that the ‘orgie’ lasted from eleven in the morning to ten at night. ‘I was not at all exhausted and could have gone on all night.’ Oddly enough, the girl refused payment. On 14 October, ten days before he sailed, he performed a sexual ‘operation’ with a chorus girl, Violet Duval, assisted by Leila Waddell, though he does not explain what part Leila played.

  In New York on 7 November, he was reduced to performing the sexual ceremony on his own, with his left hand, imagining Babalon (as he spelled it for numerological reasons), the Scarlet Whore. A week later, having sold the manuscripts to John Quinn, he was able to afford Elsie Edwards, an obese Irish prostitute who charged $3, but the ‘unattractiveness of the assistant’ made the operation difficult. On 21 November, the assistant was Florence Galy, the ‘lowest type of prostitute, very negroid in type.’ (Later, he adds that she is now in prison for theft.) After three weeks of solitary operations ‘in manibus’ (in the hand), he performed an ‘orgiastic operation’ with a Dutch prostitute, ‘the
muscular wolf type’, who inspired him to magnificent efforts, although he complained that her secretions were not very plentiful and his semen was not properly dissolved therein. Crowley was becoming something of a connoisseur—he even refers to his sperm as being ‘of excellent vintage’. But in a subsequent operation with the same girl, Crowley had diarrhoea, and had a premature ejaculation, and the elixir was of an acrid and aromatic type. He continued to perform operations with this partner through most of December and the first two weeks of January, although on 16 January 1915 he records an encounter with ‘Margaret Pitcher, a young, pretty-stupid, wide-mouthed flat-faced slim bodied harlotry’ with fair hair and a ‘fine fat juicy Yoni’—this time the elixir was ‘of pleasing quality’.

  On 26 January Crowley met a widow, Lola Auguste Grumbacher, a Brazilian with a profile like Dante, admitting to thirty-seven years of age, and found her ‘astoundingly passionate’. On the 26th she ‘received the seed into her mouth’ and so did Crowley. An hour later, she became so sexually excited that she was violently and repeatedly sick, which Crowley took to be evidence that she was possessed by the god Pan.

  On 22 May, in the dimly-lighted steam room of a Turkish bath, Crowley was twice sodomised by strangers, and performed fellatio on another. A few days later, Crowley picked up another stranger called Finch, and was the passive partner in another magical act of sodomy. Finch invited Crowley to dinner with his wife (or mother it is not clear which) and Crowley seems to have attached great importance to this occasion, hoping that it might be some kind of breakthrough in his so-far disastrous American career. On the morning of the dinner, he even performed a special sexual operation with a young mulatto prostitute named Mamie, dedicating it to making ‘a good impression on Mrs Finch and Co’. But the operation itself was a total failure. And, inevitably, the dinner was cancelled—perhaps because Mrs Finch discovered the nature of Crowley's relations with Mr Finch.

  Crowley's account of all these magical operations make one thing perfectly clear: that the magic was not some kind of excuse for sex. For Crowley, magic was a religion, and he meditated on Hermes or Thoth as a Christian monk might have meditated on Christ or the Virgin. The man who had found the magic of the Golden Dawn rather boring and tiresome had now become a single-minded magician who thought and practised magic every hour of his life.

  But on the day after the Finch fiasco, Crowley's period of frustration came to an end. A journalist friend invited him to dinner to meet two women, a poetess and an actress. The poetess was called Jane Foster, and she and Crowley were violently attracted to one another. The actress, Helen Hollis, ‘glittered with the loveliness of lust’, and was also apparently attracted to Crowley; but he much preferred Jane. The next day, at her club, Jane proposed to divorce her husband and marry Crowley. But she had to leave New York for a month, during which time Crowley continued to perform magic with prostitutes. When she returned, they became lovers; but she proceeded to torment Crowley by telling him that she detested the physical side of love (perhaps because he had insisted on sodomising her). Then she left New York again. In a state of misery, Crowley invited her rival, Helen Hollis, out to lunch, then took her back to his apartment, and without further ado, gave her a lengthy ‘serpent kiss’ with two teeth he had had specially filed for that purpose.5 The result was a mutual ‘surge of amorous frenzy’, and after a twelve hour orgy, he woke up ‘purged of iniquity’ and in a mystical state of love. This experience somehow convinced him that he should now produce a son who would also be his magical heir, and on her return, he and Jane Foster laboured to this end, apparently without success. What became of Helen Hollis is not clear, she vanishes from the autobiography.

  By now, Crowley had found himself employment—of a sort. One day, sitting on top of an omnibus reading an English newspaper, he was asked by an Irishman whether he believed in a ‘square deal for Germany and Austria.’ When he replied in the affirmative, he was invited to come to the office of a newspaper called The Fatherland, edited by a man Crowley had met in London: George Sylvester Viereck, a German-American poet. Crowley, scenting employment, turned on all his charm, and even threw in the falsehood that he was Irish; Viereck promply hired him to write anti-British propaganda for The Fatherland, directed at German-Americans.

  Crowley's version of this discreditable episode is contained in a lengthy chapter of the Confessions, in which he prints a justification that he wrote a few years later. This justification is that he was actually attempting to discredit German propaganda by making claims so preposterous that no sane reader could swallow them. The Fatherland, Crowley said, was learned and logical; he would make it stupid and absurd. ‘I worked up Viereck gradually from relatively reasonable attacks on England to extravagances which achieved my object of revolting every comparatively sane human being on earth.’ But, he says, he did it with such cunning that the Germans never suspected he had his tongue in his cheek. It was a brave and noble sacrifice on Crowley's part—to allow his fellow countrymen to think him a traitor when he was actually working for the benefit of his country. He would have been saddened but not surprised by the lack of understanding of his motives. Years later, John Symonds wrote to Crowley's ‘friend’ Commodore Sir Guy Gaunt, director of British Intelligence in America, to ask if it was really true that Crowley was working for British interests in America. Gaunt replied:

  I think you describe him 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—he was very anxious to keep his name before the public somehow or other.

  But he revealed that the British government was sufficiently worried about Crowley's activities to recall Gaunt from America to discuss what could be done; Gaunt urged that Crowley and The Fatherland were too unimportant to be worth worrying about. This view seems to be confirmed by the lack of impact of Crowley's other Fatherland publicity stunt: he and Leila Waddell (who had joined him in New York) took a motorboat out to the Statue of Liberty one morning, and Crowley made a speech renouncing England, proclaiming his willingness to fight to the last drop of his blood for Irish freedom, then tore up an envelope which (he declared) contained his British passport. Then Leila played ‘The Wearing of the Green’ on her violin. Crowley then sent a report of his gesture to various newspapers, but only the New York Times printed it. This gesture, Crowley explains in his Confesssions, was designed to win the trust of the Germans. The Hon. Everard Feilding saw the item in the New York Times and wrote Crowley a pained letter, but when Crowley replied explaining his true motives (to hoodwink the enemy) Feilding apparently ‘understood and approved.’ At least, so Crowley assures us; Feilding's view of the matter has not survived.

  Presumably as a result of his writings for The Fatherland, Crowley had now made enough money to travel, and he proceeded to rush from New York to Detroit, Chicago, Vancouver—where one of his former disciples had set up a magical group—then to Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. There he attempted to see Katherine Tingley, head of the American Theosophical Society, intending to propose an alliance, but his reputation had preceded him, and she declined to see him. He returned east via the Grand Canyon, which he found inferior to the Himalayas. Somewhere along the road back to New York he discarded Jane Foster, having decided that she was unworthy after all—he had come close to marrying her.

  In New York he met the Indian writer on religion, Ananda K. Koomaraswamy, and lost no time in seducing his wife, a Yorkshire woman, who moved in with Crowley and became pregnant. Koomaraswamy apparently agreed to a divorce until his wife suddenly made a success as a singer (Crowley claims all the credit) and decided he wanted her back after all. But after a great deal more to-ing and fro-ing, she returned to England to have the baby, and had a miscarriage on the boat. Crowley was not too concerned about all this, for he was now in a state of immense excitement about a more important matter. The disciple in Vancouver—a man named Jones, known as ‘Frater Achad’—had written to say that he
had had a mystical vision, and that the Secret Chiefs had informed him that he was now ready to become a Master of the Temple, the same grade as Crowley himself. Crowley calculated that this happened precisely nine months after he and Jane Foster had tried so hard to beget a son. The conclusion was obvious. Although he and his mistress had failed, a son had been begotten in the magical sphere, and was therefore (presumably) ready to begin promulgating the doctrines of Crowleyanity, as prophesied in The Book of the Law. This also meant, of course, that Crowley had to move up another grade if he was to retain his superior position. In fact, Crowley had already awarded himself the supreme grade of Magus in the previous year (1915) and he now only had to ratify it with the correct magical ceremonies. This involved catching a frog, baptising it as Jesus of Nazareth, then crucifying it on a cross and stabbing it with a dagger. All this he did in the summer of 1916 near Bristol, New Hampshire and, having symbolically set himself up in the place of Christ, he gave himself a new magical name, Master Therion, or The Beast. Crowley might be unsuccessful in the worldly sense, but in the spiritual sense he was rising like a rocket.