Aleister Crowley Read online

  But the urge to cast off his Christian background had become a neurotic obsession that dominated his life. When his chemistry professor at Eastbourne denounced the Bible, ‘it almost took my breath away to hear a man in authority speak so openly.’ It never struck Crowley that it might be possible to dismiss Christianity as superstitious nonsense, and then get on with more important things. Crowley's sense of guilt was so strong that defiance of religion had to be a moral crusade. Shaw once remarked of Wagner's obsession with incest that it was all very well, but what sensible person wanted to sleep with his sister? Crowley would have been incapable of this kind of detachment. He records that, on his first stolen visit to the theatre, he looked around at the audience and wondered: ‘Aren't all these people afraid of being found out?’ So instead of trying to make use of his natural talent for science or languages, he continued to look around for a career that would ‘shock the bourgeoisie’ and outrage their moral standards.

  Writing poetry seemed a step in the right direction. At Malvern he had written a poem in honour of Florence Maybrick, sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment) for poisoning her husband, who objected to her affair with a certain Mr Brierly.

  Poor lady! whom a wicked jury's hate

  In face of facts as iron as the grave

  To which they would have doomed thee – bitter fate!

  Thee guiltless to the cruel hangman gave.

  Crowley admitted that his sympathy for Mrs Maybrick ‘nowise argues my belief in her innocence. She was admittedly an adulteress. I asked no further questions. The mere fact thrilled me to the marrow. Adultery being the summit of wickedness, its commision excused everything.’

  The earliest influence on Crowley's poetry was Swinburne:

  Are the roses dead to-day?

  Is the wine spilt? Is the flute

  Broken? Is thy lover fled?

  Has the dancer danced away?

  Is the voice of ocean mute?

  Is the hour of dreamland dead?

  Nay, the slumbers of thine head

  Shall be until thy lures,

  Love shall gird thee as a garment

  while thy very life endures.

  But it can be seen that he lacks Swinburne's natural talent for verbal music; his poetry never seems to flow freely for more than a line or two. Then he seems to get himself tangled up in language:

  Ere the grape of joy is golden

  With the summer and the sun

  Ere the maidens unbeholden

  Gather one by one,

  To the vineyard comes the shower,

  No sweet rain to fresh the flower,

  But the thunder rain that cleaves,

  Rends and ruins tender leaves.

  ‘Fresh the flower’ sounds awkward, and the last three lines have to be read several times to grasp their meaning.

  Even in the nature poetry, where there is a more obvious sincerity, there is this same odd clumsiness:

  Blind the iron pinnacles edge the twilight;

  Blind and black the gills of the mountain clefted,

  Crag and snow-clad slope in a distant vision

  Rise as before me.

  At the age of twenty, Crowley was trying to build a career on a complete misconception of his natural talents. This was, in fact, the year he went up to Cambridge. The Eastbourne period had ended in an unusually violent eruption. He lived with his tutor's family, and sympathised strongly with the middle daughter, a ‘beautiful, voluptuous and normal’ girl who was engaged to an equally normal young man. But the family insisted that they could only marry on condition he became a Plymouth Brother. When the young man decided against it, he was thrown out of the house, and the girl was subjected to continuous abuse and ill-treatment. ‘Meals were a poisoned whirlwind…’ ‘One morning at breakfast I said about a millionth part of what I thought and the family started screaming. It was as if they had been attacked by a collective mania. Everything was thrown at me; they went for me with claws and fists. They were too blind with rage to know what they were doing. I simply knocked their heads together and walked out of the house. When I thought the atmosphere had had time to dissipate I returned with the intention of carrying out a rescue for the distressed damsel. They were too much scared to oppose me, and I begged her to come away at once and go to her ex-fiancé's family. But she could not summon up courage to do it…later in the afternoon my Uncle Tom, summoned by telegram, came to fetch me away from the accursed spot…’

  Crowley's language, as on so many other occasions, obscures what actually happened. Did they physically attack him? Did he physically attack them? At all events, it seems to have confirmed Crowley's feeling that people were afraid of him. ‘The incident had a wholesome effect upon my own family. They had failed to break my spirit and begun to realize that I had reached the stage when I could make as much trouble for them as they could for me. The best thing they could do was to let me go my own way. I had won the fight; and the evidence was my season in the Bernese Oberland on my own responsibility. I was recalled by telegram. They had decided to let me go to Trinity.’

  It was the beginning of a new epoch in his life. ‘I had the sensation of drawing a long deep breath as one does after swimming under water…’ He was intoxicated with freedom, and took advantage of it to read all kinds of books he had never been allowed to read—Carlyle, Swift, Coleridge, Fielding, Gibbon—and to have as many sexual liaisons as possible.’…at Cambridge I discovered that I was of an intensely passionate nature, physiologically speaking. My poetic instincts, further, transformed the most sordid liaisons into romance, so that the impossibility of contracting a suitable and serious relation did not worry me.’ There was no prostitution in Cambridge, ‘but nearly all the younger women of the district are eager to co-operate in the proper spirit.’ Even so, he found the time he had to devote to pursuing them a continual irritation. He records in the autobiography that he resents the system that makes it necessary to waste so much time pursuing something that ought to be delivered with the milk. And while Crowley found women necessary to satisfy his physical needs, he found them unsatisfying as human beings. ‘Intellectually…they did not exist. Even the few whose minds were not completely blank had them furnished with Wardour Street Chippendale. Their attainments were those of the ape and the parrot. These facts did not deter me. On the contrary, it was highly convenient that one's sexual relations should be with an animal…’ Crowley was devoid of the element of protectiveness on which most successful male-female partnerships are based, so it is unsurprising that most of his longterm sexual relationships ended in disaster.

  He decided to enter the diplomatic service because ‘it seemed to afford the greatest opportunities for worldly enjoyment.’ The court that appealed to him most was that of Imperial Russia, and he went to St Petersburg in the long vacation of 1897. It was on his way back from Russia that he attended a chess congress in Berlin, and suddenly decided that he no longer wanted to be world champion. Watching these shabby nonentities ‘I perceived with preternatural lucidity that I had not alighted on this planet with the object of playing chess.’

  But what had he alighted on it for? On the last day of the previous year, he had had a strange mystical experience in Stockholm that seemd to give him a glimpse of his way forward:

  I was awakened to the knowledge that I possessed a magical means of becoming conscious of and satisfying a part of my nature which had up to that moment concealed itself from me. It was an experience of horror and pain, combined with a certain ghostly terror, yet at the same time it was the key to the purest and holiest spiritual ecstasy that exists. At the time, I was not aware of the supreme importance of the matter. It seemed to me little more than a development of certain magical processes with which I was already familiar…

  It is obvious that Crowley is quite determined to speak in riddles. In The Great Beast, Symonds suggests that ‘he had an illumination that he could control reality by magical thinking.’ If so, why did he not say so? When Crowley
is reticent in the Confessions, it is usually on account of the censor (for example, he fails to mention that he left Tonbridge school because he caught gonorrhoea). Moreover, the comment that it seemed to be a ‘development of certain magical processes already known to me’ also seems to afford a clue, for in 1896, when he was only twenty-one, Crowley still knew nothing about magic—that only came about two years later, when he met an alchemist called Julian Baker. The only ‘magic’ he refers to in the Confessions before that date is sex magic, as, for example, when he says that he made his ‘magical affirmation’ with the parlour maid on his mother's bed. We should also take note of the words ‘I possessed a magical means of becoming conscious of and satisfying a part of my nature which had up to that moment concealed itself from me.’ What part of his nature had so far concealed itself from him? The obvious answer is surely: his homosexuality. So far, Crowley's sexuality had been, as he never tires of emphasising, completely normal—so that he remarks about his early period at Cambridge: ‘My skill in avoiding corporal punishment and my lack of opportunity for inflicting it had saved me from developing the sadistic or masochistic sides to my character.’ It therefore seems probable that the revelation that came to Crowley in Stockholm was of his homosexual tendencies, or perhaps his inherent masochism and the possibility of satisfying it by becoming the passive partner in acts of sodomy.

  Symonds’ mistake probably arises from the fact that Crowley says that the revelation took place at midnight on 31 December 1896, and that he was ‘awakened’ to the magical knowledge; it sounds as if Crowley woke up from sleep. But 31 December is New Year's Eve, and it is more likely that Crowley was enjoying the New Year's Eve celebrations when some homosexual encounter made him aware of this element in his own nature.

  This matter is connected with another curious minor mystery about Crowley's development. 1895, the year he went up to Cambridge, was also the year of the trial of Oscar Wilde. Wilde and Crowley had a great deal in common; in fact, Wilde's attitude to sin and to Christian morality is so close to Crowley's own that Crowley often sounds as if he is echoing Wilde. We know that Crowley was swept off his feet by the poetry of Swinburne; it seems unbelievable that he was not equally enraptured by Wilde's Sphinx and Picture of Dorian Grey. Yet the only lengthy passage about Wilde in the Confessions takes a patronising tone, and implies that Wilde became a homosexual simply as a method of getting to know ‘the right people’ at Oxford. This negative attitude towards a man Crowley might have been expected to admire wholeheartedly arouses the inevitable suspicion that Crowley was influenced by Wilde, but for some reason preferred not to acknowledge it. The last thing he wanted was to be labelled a kind of imitation-Oscar. And this, in turn, gives rise to another suspicion: that Crowley's homosexual experiment may have been inspired by Wilde, and by a certain romanticism about the ‘love that dare not speak its name.’ This, at all events, is a suspicion that seems consistent with the facts.

  In 1897, the year he went to Russia, Crowley experienced another ‘dark night of the soul’ that was to profoundly affect his whole mental outlook. It was during an illness, a few months after his return from St Petersburg, that he went through a period of deep depression, during which he found himself ‘forced to meditate upon the fact of mortality.’ ‘I was appalled by the futility of all human endeavour.’ Suddenly, all life seemed pointless. What if he became England's ambassador to Paris? His name would be forgotten in a hundred years. What if he became a great poet? He was in one of England's two great universities, yet hardly anyone knew anything about Aeschylus. Suppose he became a Homer or Shakespeare, a Caesar or Napoleon: what would it all matter when the earth finally disappeared?

  Instead of concluding that this gloomy view was simply the outcome of illness and too many hangovers, Crowley allowed himself to be convinced that he was contemplating some profound universal truth—in fact, the first of the Buddha's four noble truths: the recognition that life is nothing but suffering. This led him to decide: ‘I must find a material in which to work which is immune from the forces of change.’ ‘Brain and body were valueless except as instruments of the soul’. ‘The ordinary materialist usually fails to recognize that only spiritual affairs count for anything, even in the grossest concerns of life…Material welfare is only important as assisting men towards a consciousness of satisfaction.’ This is obviously a profoundly important recognition, and reveals that, for all his faults, Crowley was capable of thinking his way through to important insights. The businessman strives for wealth as if wealth in itself could provide a means of satisfaction; other men strive for fame, for power, for sexual conquest, for the same reason. But most of these things turn out to be curiously disappointing. This is because our real aim is to achieve power over the mind itself, and without this power, all ‘achievement’ is futile.

  But having achieved this important insight, which sounds like the beginning of wisdom, Crowley proceeded to subject it to his own peculiarly twisted logic. ‘From the nature of things, therefore, life is a sacrament; in other words, all our acts are magical acts. Our spiritual consciousness acts through the will and its instruments upon material objects, in order to produce changes which will result in the establishment of the new conditions of consciousness which we wish. That is the definition of Magick.’ (Crowley preferred to spell it with a ‘k’ to distinguish it from the common use of ‘magic’.) He then goes on to admit:

  But I was so far from perceiving that every act is magical, whether one likes it or not, that I supposed the escape from matter to involve a definite invasion of the spiritual world. Indeed, I was so far from understanding that matter was in its nature secondary and symbolic, that my principal preoccupation was to obtain first-hand sensory evidence of spiritual beings. In other words, I wanted to evoke the denizens of other planes to visible and audible appearance.

  But which denizens? For Crowley, there were two sides: angels and devils:

  On the Christian hypothesis the reality of evil makes the devil equal to God. [And if I had to take sides, then] it was not difficult to make up my mind. The forces of good were those which had constantly oppressed me. I saw them daily destroying the happiness of my fellow men. Since, therefore it was my business to experience the spiritual world, my first step must be to get into personal communication with the devil.

  In order to understand this Alice in Wonderland logic, which will strike most people as unintentionally funny, we have to grasp that Crowley had suffered so much from religious idiots that the very word ‘goodness’ aroused a Pavlovian reaction of fury. He possessed a powerful, logical mind; it should have been easy enough to see that real goodness is another name for human decency, and has nothing to do with religious bigotry. But while his mother and Uncle Tom were, figuratively speaking, breathing down his neck, he was unable to exercise normal logic. So, like some latter-day Faust, Crowley decided that the correct response to his Vision of Universal Suffering was to try and raise demons. He went to the nearest bookseller and asked for a work on ritual magic. He was handed a compilation called The Book of Black Magic and Pacts by A. E. Waite, a member of the Golden Dawn. Crowley found this thoroughly disappointing; it seemed to be full of spells for preventing a huntsman from killing game or bewitching a neighbour's cows. This was not the real stuff of diabolism, as revealed in Huysmans’ novel Là-Bas, with its Black Masses and sexual orgies. But a passage in the book seemed to hint that Waite knew of some Hidden Church which preserved the mysteries of true initiation. Crowley wrote to Waite, who replied with a letter advising him to read a book called The Cloud upon the Sanctuary by Karl von Eckartshausen, an eighteenth century German mystic who wrote about precisely such a secret religious order. Crowley read it again and again, and became obsessed by the idea of reaching this secret order:

  The sublimity of the idea enthralled me; it satisfied my craving for romance and poetry. I determined with my whole heart to make myself worthy to attract the notice of this mysterious brotherhood. I yearned passionately for illumination.
I could imagine nothing more exquisite than to enter into communion with these holy men and to acquire the power of communicating with the angelic and divine intelligence of the universe.

  All this was at least a little more satisfying than the Celtic Church, a curious communion of which he had become a member, and which ‘moved in an atmosphere of fairies, seal women and magical operations’. The Celtic Church had made Crowley dream of going in quest of the Holy Grail; while membership of another movement, the Spanish Legitimists (which wished to place Don Carlos on the throne of Spain) led him to dream of becoming a man of action; but Don Carlos changed his mind and the conspiracy collapsed. Crowley was in a state of spiritual flux, possessed by contradictory yearnings to become a member of a secret order of saints and a devil worshipper.

  Mountain climbing continued to obsess him; he was an excellent climber, who had taught himself by scrambling up Cumberland fells and Beachy Head, then began to spend every holiday in the Alps or Bernese Oberland. He found an opportunity to express some of his innate inclination to hero worship when he met an experienced mountaineer called Oscar Eckenstein in the Lake District. Eckenstein was a scientist, and he set out to teach Crowley all about the techniques of climbing; it seems clear that he became the father figure Crowley had seen searching for ever since the death of his father.

  A completely different kind of friendship sprang up between Crowley and a female impersonator named Herbert Pollitt, ten years Crowley's senior, who came to Cambridge to take part in the Footlights revue. Pollitt had long, pale-gold hair, and tragic eyes, and ‘his outlook on life was desperate.’ Crowley admits that ‘the relation between us was that ideal intimacy which the Greeks considered the greatest glory of manhood’, but then deliberately sets out to mislead when he adds that the English connect such ideas with physical passion. There can be little doubt that the relationship with Pollitt was Crowley's first fully-fledged homosexual affair. Pollitt was a friend of Aubrey Beardsley, and introduced Crowley to the work of other ‘decadent’ writers and artists. (This is why it seems incomprehensible that Crowley makes no mention of having read Wilde.) ‘In his heart was a hunger for beauty which I can only call hideous and cruel, because it was so hopeless.’ But Pollitt felt that Crowley's ‘spiritual aspirations’—the yearning to join some secret brotherhood—were futile and pointless, and Crowley finally decided to break with him. In spite of his own tendency to pessimism, there was an instinct for health in Crowley that led him to turn his back on the feeble and the defeated.