Aleister Crowley Read online

  Playfair's book about his researches in Brazil—The Flying Cow—brought another startling insight: that there is a connection between poltergeist phenomena and magic. In the first case he investigated, in Sao Paulo, a Portuguese family was being subjected to continual persecution by a poltergeist: oddly enough, it had followed them from house to house. There were no children in the family: the son and daughter were both adults. The poltergeist kept them awake at night, set bedding on fire, and soaked it with water. There was some evidence of black magic: a photograph stitched with thread had been found in the house. Playfair heard the bangs, and witnessed other phenomena—at one point, a wardrobe full of clothes was set on fire and would have burned the house down if it had not been discovered.

  The family finally decided to call in a candomblé specialist (candomblé is a form of voodoo). This man told the family that they were being persecuted by black magic—the troubles were connected with the son's marriage. And after the performance of various magical rites, the poltergeist left.

  Playfair learned that ‘voodoo’ magicians or witch doctors can summon poltergeists, and direct them to cause trouble to certain people, and his book contains many other examples of this practice. Witches have always, of course claimed to make use of spirits. If Playfair was right, then this was quite literally true.

  I must admit that all this left me feeling rather shaken. I had been studying ‘the occult’ for more than ten years, and had never doubted for a moment that most of its mysteries can be explained in terms of the unknown powers of the human mind—telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and so on. It was startling to suddenly be confronted with evidence for the existence of ‘spirits.’ I had never actually taken the position that there are no such things as spirits; but I had always assumed that, if they exist, they play only a small part in paranormal phenomena. Now I found myself obliged to recognize that they play a central part.

  It was also at about this time that I discovered Max Freedom Long's book The Secret Science Behind Miracles—an off-putting title that does no justice to the contents of the book. During his years in Hawaii after the first world war, Long devoted himself to the study of the ancient native religion of the kahunas, the ‘keepers of the secret’. He soon learned that stories about the ‘death prayer’ were not the superstitious absurdity he had at first assumed, and that even European doctors admitted that when a patient was brought into hospital suffering from the ‘death prayer’, there was very little they could do for them. Long's researches left him in no doubt that the kahuna magicians made use of a form of voodoo which involved making use of ‘spirits’ to drain victims of their vital energies until they died. Long's chief mentor, Dr Brigham, had once succeeded in saving one of these intended victims, and in directing the ‘death prayer’ back at the witch doctor who was responsible; the result was the death of the witch doctor.

  It sounded preposterous, yet the evidence was overwhelming. It all pointed in the same direction: that poltergeists are ‘spirits’ who are able to manifest themselves only by making use of the energy of human beings—usually those who are emotionally disturbed. They appear to be of extremely low intelligence and to behave like bored juvenile delinquents. And they seem perfectly happy to assist ‘magicians’ in creating mischief, since this is the kind of thing they enjoy anyway.

  Not long after the book came out, I encountered an interesting case that confirmed my findings. A young married woman wrote to ask my advice about a disturbing series of events that had happened to her in Brazil. She began to suspect that her husband was being unfaithful to her with a native woman. And a woman who claimed to be a clairvoyant stopped her spontaneously in a street and told her that she had been bewitched. Life seemed to turn into a series of minor problems and obstacles. The relationship with her husband became worse and worse. One day, as she sat in the bath, her wedding ring began to slip from her finger. She watched it with astonishment. It was a fairly tight fit, yet it slipped down her finger as if it had suddenly become loose. Then it fell into the water. When she got out of the bath, she decided not to pull out the plug, in case she lost the ring; instead, she carefully bailed out the water with a saucepan. But when the bath was empty, there was no ring.

  A few weeks later, convinced that her marriage was about to break up, she obeyed a sudden urge to go and see her husband at his place of work and make one final plea. It worked; their differences dissolved and they made up. Back at home, she felt exhausted and decided to have a bath, and while she was in the bath, she decided to wash her knickers. As she picked them up to squeeze out the soapy water, her wedding ring fell out of them. Her story, far more detailed than I have reported, left me in no doubt that she was another victim of voodoo, and that her rival was probably responsible for the ‘spell’. It was an interesting example of what can be accomplished by magic.

  This recognition may have placed me beyond the pale of respectable scientific investigators, but it had the advantage of unifying my own views on the paranormal. Modern shamans or witch doctors declare that their power comes from the dead, from spirits, and that they perform their ‘magic’ with the aid of spirits. Their only power is that of mediumship, the ability to place themselves in contact with spirits. Shamans and witches have made the same claim throughout the ages, although they often insist that the ‘spirits’ are not only those of the dead; there are also nature spirits, or elementals.

  In 1926, Montague Summers—whom Richard Cammell introduced to Crowley—achieved overnight fame with a book called The History of Witchcraft and Demonology. It was an extremely scholarly book, part of a series on the history of civilization. What startled the reviewers was that Summers seemed to believe every word he wrote about the ‘enormous wickedness’ of witches and warlocks. H.G. Wells launched a vituperative attack on it in the Sunday Express. He could understand how a Catholic could believe in the reality of evil; but the notion that human beings could have intercourse with demonic forces evidently struck him as sheer intellectual perversity; he obviously thought Summers was either a charlatan or an idiot. When I first read the book, in my teens, I thought Summers had his tongue in his cheek. Now, as I re-read it, I could see how Summers could believe in witchcraft without in any way compromising his intellectual integrity. I could also see that when Summers wrote: ‘Modern spiritualism is merely witchcraft revived’, he was not all that far from the truth. Throughout the ages, shamans and witches have established contact with ‘spirits’, and tried to use them for their own purposes; the Elizabethan magician John Dee had no such talents himself, and used a ‘scryer’ (descryer, or one who sees), another name for a medium. During the age of reason, belief in witchcraft finally evaporated; by the mid-19th century, scientists were totally convinced that all forms of ‘occultism’ were a relic of the bad old days of superstition. Then the curious poltergeist phenomena in the home of the Fox sisters in New York state caused a nationwide sensation. All over America, people began holding seances and discovered that it was easy to get ‘phenomena’. The ‘spirits’ ordered the Fox sisters to found a new religion called Spiritualism, and prophesied its success. Within a few years, it had established itself all over the world, and the scientists raged and uttered denunciations as this new wave of ‘superstition’ made thousands of converts. In fact, the pendulum was simply swinging back in the opposite direction, and the world was rediscovering the most ancient of religions: shamanism.

  In Russia, a lively overweight girl named Helena Hahn began to see ‘spirits’ at an early age, and realised she was a natural medium. She made an unwise marriage at sixteen to a middle-aged man named Blavatsky, and left him almost immediately. As she wandered around Europe as a travelling companion to various ladies, the tidal wave of spiritualism came rolling across the Atlantic. Helena Blavatsky became a friend of one of the most remarkable mediums of all time, the young American Daniel Dunglas Home, who could cause tables to float up to the ceiling and wash his face in red hot coals. Helena realised that her own psychic powers co
uld probably be used to her advantage in America, and landed in New York in 1873, at the age of forty-two. Success was slow to come, but four years later, she achieved overnight fame with a book called Isis Unveiled, which became a bestseller. She explained to her disciples that she had acquired her esoteric knowledge in Tibet, where she had been taught by ‘secret masters’. These masters of wisdom were in charge of human evolution on earth, and they communicated with her nightly, and sometimes during the day, by causing notes to drop from the air. The society that Helena Blavatsky formed with the aid of her admirer, Colonel Olcott, was called the Theosophical Society, and was devoted to disseminating the wisdom of the Masters. The year after Isis Unveiled, Madame Blavatsky decided to move the Society to India, where it achieved considerable success. A book about her teachings—or rather, those of the Masters—called Esoteric Buddhism by A.P. Sinnett also became a bestseller, and spread the doctrine far and wide; there were soon branches of the Theosophical Society in every capital in Europe.

  Madame Blavatsky's downfall came in 1884, when the newly-formed Society for Psychical Research sent a young investigator to India to study her claims. But Madame Blavatsky was absent when Richard Hodgson arrived, and he fell into the hands of her disaffected ex-housekeepers, the Coulombs, who soon convinced him that she was a fraud. To some extent, they may have been telling the truth; yet no one who studies the evidence can doubt that she was a genuine and very powerful medium. Hodgson's report denounced her. Many followers remained faithful, but thousands of others left the movement. Madame Blavatsky moved to London, where she spent the last few years of her life writing a vast work called The Secret Doctrine; she died at the age of sixty. Yet in spite of her tribulations, and the general view that she was an old charlatan, Helena Blavatsky exercised an enormous influence on her time. Theosophy arrived at exactly the right moment. By the second half of the 19th century, there was a deep and powerful craving for some new form of religion. Darwinism had caused a major spiritual crisis. Many clergymen were beset by ‘doubts’ and felt obliged to resign their livings. In In Memoriam Tennyson expresses the despair of the sensitive intellectual when faced with an apparently meaningless and Godless universe. There was a general feeling that science had deprived man of all hope, and that it was time for a backswing of the pendulum. So when, in 1883, A.P. Sinnett assured readers of Esoteric Buddhism that there really were ‘secret masters’ in Tibet, and that they possessed the wisdom of the ages, he accidentally touched that spring of almost morbid craving for new spiritual values. Moreover, Sinnett was no crank; he was the respectable editor of India's most respectable newspaper, the voice of the establishment. Esoteric Buddism was like the falling rock that starts a landslide. The poet W.B. Yeats read it, and was wildly excited. He handed it to his friend Charles Johnston, who immediately rushed to London to get permission to set up a Dublin branch of the Theosophical Society. And the same thing was happening in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna. (In Vienna, a young man named Rudolf Steiner, who was also striving to create his own revolt against materialism, was impressed by the book although he thought the talk of ‘secret masters’ too materialistic.) For all her faults, and for all the chaotic obscurity of her major works, Madame Blavatsky provided something that thousands were searching for.

  Four years after the publication of Esoteric Buddhism a London coroner named Dr Wynn Westcott somehow came into possession of an ancient-looking manuscript written in a cipher that looked like a mixture of ancient Greek and astrological symbols. Westcott was interested in Freemasonry and occultism. He cracked the cipher, and discovered that the manuscript contained five magical rituals. He asked his friend Samuel Liddell Mathers, an eccentric scholar, to help him expand the material so the rituals could be performed. He also, he claimed, found among the manuscript pages the address of a certain Fraulein Sprengel in Stuttgart. He wrote to her, and learned that the rituals were the property of a German occult group called Die Goldene Dämmerung—the Golden Dawn—and she authorised him to set up a London branch of this magical order. So, in 1888, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn came into being in London. Its purpose was the traditional purpose of magic: to establish contact with ‘higher spiritual realms’ by means of magical ritual and disciplines. Like the Theosophical Society, it touched some chord of intellectual craving, and soon had branches in Edinburgh, Weston-super-Mare and Bradford. The influence of Madame Blavatsky may be gauged from its complete title: the Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn.

  But there was another influence that was equally powerful: the magician of whom Crowley later believed he was a reincarnation: Eliphas Lévi, the author of Dogma and Ritual of High Magic. Lévi, whose real name was Alphonse Louis Constant, was a failed priest who became a left-wing journalist. Then Constant became the disciple of a strange Polish nobleman named Wronski who believed that he had discovered the ultimate secret of life: how to use the sense-impressions of a lifetime to create ultimate reality inside one's own head. Wronski's wife thought he was a god, and so must have been surprised when he died in 1853. But Constant had met him in the year before his death, and after cataloguing Wronski's manuscripts, he plunged into the study of occultism. And in 1855 and 1856 he published his two-volume work on ‘high magic’. Like Esoteric Buddism, this also began with an assertion of a mysterious secret doctrine that had been passed down the ages, which is ‘everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed.’ In that romantic era, the book achieved a wide influence. The English novelist Bulwer Lytton was greatly impressed by Lévi, and portrayed him as the magician in his most famous story The Haunted and the Haunters. He was also fascinated by Levi's claim to have conjured up the shade of the magician Apollonius of Tyana through magic rituals. Lévi claimed that the spirit answered his questions telepathically, and caused his arm to become numb by touching it. Lévi died in 1875, two years before Madame Blavatsky was launched to fame by Isis Unveiled, but he was regarded as a kind of saint of the new occult movement. Modern readers of his books on magic will find them disappointing. His knowledge of magic was obviously far smaller than he would like us to believe; for example, he sets himself up as an expert on the Hebrew Kabbalah without knowing a word of Hebrew. In short, Lévi was a mixture of poet and charlatan, and his books owe more to imagination than to scholarship.

  The reader who based his ideas of magic on Lévi's books might feel justified in assuming that it is all self-deception and wishful thinking. This would be premature. In fact, many anthropological works contain accounts of shamanistic magic that make it clear that it can and does work. There are, for example, innumerable accounts of fire-walking. In 1899, a New Zealand magistrate, Colonel Gudgeon, went to watch a Maori fire-walking ceremony, and felt apprehension when he was invited to join in. But the words ‘I hand my mana, my power, over to you’ had the effect of making his feet immune to the red hot cinders, and he experienced only a tingling sensation. Max Freedom Long's mentor Dr Brigham had less faith, and declined to walk on the hot lava in a volcano without wearing his heavy boots. In the few seconds it took him to run across the lava, the boots were burnt off his feet, the soles flapping loose. Yet the kahunas strolled across with only a few leaves on their feet.

  The trick, it seems, lies in the mental preparation. George and Helen Sandwith, who described the fire-walking ceremony in Fiji, noted that the essential feature was that the fire-walkers’ were charged with some unknown type of energy.. and ten days of ritual preparation were devoted to this.’ This enabled them to walk across a fire-pit so hot that it could cause scorching at a distance of twelve feet. In the mid-1980s, fire-walking spiritual cults spread from America to Great Britain, and were featured on television; perfectly ordinary people demonstrated that it was possible to walk on hot coals. But here again, it was clear that the essential feature was the mental preparation beforehand—the meditation, and the creation of a mood of total self-confidence.

  All this would seem to indicate that the human mind has unsuspected powers over the body, but that these powers
must be aroused from the depths of the mind. Lévi prepared himself for his invocation of Apollonius of Tyana by observing a vegetarian diet for three weeks beforehand, and fasting completely for the last week; during this time he meditated constantly on Apollonius and held imaginary conversations with him. The result of such preparation and concentration is to arouse some deep, unified will-force in the unconscious mind: what Crowley was to call ‘the true will’. One of Shaw's Ancients in Back to Methuselah says: ‘The brain shall not fail when the will is in earnest.’ It would seem that Shaw had stumbled upon one of the basic principles of ritual magic. Aleister Crowley would devote his life to the exploration and analysis of this secret.

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  1. Published in 1974 as Crowley on Christ, edited by Francis King.

  Two

  The Reluctant Christian

  THROUGHOUT his life, Crowley had serious public relations problems; he was widely regarded as a warped and depraved exhibitionist. And this was not due, as in the case of so many ‘outsiders’, to the incomprehension of the general public. It was due to a silly, schoolboyish desire to cock a snook at Victorian morality. So, for example, the marginal notes to a 1906 essay contain harmless-looking Latin phrases like ‘Adest Rosa Secreta Eros’ and ‘Quid Umbratur In Mari’, the sole point of which is that their initial letters spell ‘arse’ and ‘quim’; the initials of another sentence spell ‘piss’ and ‘cunt.’ But when this was read out in court in a libel case four years later—when a friend of Crowley's named Jones was trying to defend himself against a particularly nasty journalistic attack—it had the unfortunate effect of causing the verdict to go against Jones. The defence argument was that anyone who was a friend of Crowley's had no reputation to lose, and the jury agreed.