Aleister Crowley Read online

  By now, Crowley was calling himself Count Vladimir Svareff, and no doubt speaking with an appropriate Russian accent. He explains in the Confessions that it was a psychological experiment, to see how people would treat a Russian nobleman. In fact, he was probably influenced by Mathers—‘MacGregor of Glenstrae’—and by his own incorrigible egoism.

  But the desire to be a magician was undoubtedly genuine. In his Chancery Lane temple, he was practising the magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, a forgotten magician Mathers had discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and translated into English. Abra-Melin's rituals differ markedly from those of other grimoires, for example, the Key of Solomon or Sword of Moses, with their solemn invocation of demons—all performed from within a magic circle; by comparison, Abra-Melin is quiet and almost mystical in tone, and the invocations sound like prayers. No magic circle or pentacle is required—merely a ‘holy place, such as an altar constructed in a wood. For six months, the magician must ‘inflame himself with prayer’. If he is successful, his Holy Guardian Angel will manifest himself, and he will instruct the magician in good and evil spirits.

  Crowley began practising Abra-Melin magic in his Chancery Lane temple, with the help of Bennett and his friend Jones. And he seems to have obtained almost immediate results. There is no need to disbelieve him when he says ‘during this time, magical phenomena were of constant occurrence’, although we may suspect that all Crowley was doing was to involve himself in some form of ‘spiritualism’ not unlike table-turning or playing with an Ouija board. Anyone who sits around in the dark, trying to invoke spirits for long enough, will probably obtain some unusual results. The classic experiment—performed many years after Crowley's death—was devised by the Toronto Society for Psychical Research, who decided to ‘conjure up’ a spirit they had invented themselves, an English nobleman called Philip who had committed suicide after his mistress was burned as a witch. After a while, raps sounded from a table, and the entity identified itself—by means of a code—as Philip, and told his life story in some detail. Later on, the ‘possessed’ table appeared on television and walked up on to the platform by rocking back and forth up the steps. The Toronto group was convinced that they had proved that ‘spirits’ are the creation of the unconscious mind; but an equally plausible hypothesis is that they succeeded in invoking the kind of dubious entity that often manifests at seances.1

  At all events, Crowley found that ‘demons’ came unsought, and that semi-solid shadows were appearing on the stairs. He locked the temple door before leaving for dinner with Jones; when he came back, it was open, and the furniture had been disarranged and symbols flung on the floor—typical poltergeist activity.

  Crowley and Jones decided that Bennett would die unless he could be sent to a warmer climate. The problem was that Bennett was Crowley's teacher, and Crowley felt strongly that it is a violation of the laws of magic to accept money. He and Jones invoked the spirit Buer, the healer of the sick, and he claims that they saw a helmeted head and a solid left leg, although the rest was cloudy. The operation had to be accounted a failure.

  Then Crowley had an idea. He was having a love affair with the wife of a colonel—Crowley rejected the idea that the aspiring magician must be strictly chaste—and had been trying to get rid of her. The woman begged Crowley to see her at her hotel. Crowley went, and told her he would offer her the opportunity of doing a completely unselfish act—to give him a hundred pounds for a friend. She handed over the money, and Bennett was able to sail for Ceylon, where he became a Buddhist monk. John Symonds makes the not implausible suggestion that the real reason Crowley decided not to give Bennett the money himself was that he was less rich than he pretended to be, and was running through his inheritance at an alarming speed.

  It was obvious that London was no place to carry out the full ritual prescribed by Abra-Melin the Mage—to begin with, it takes six months to complete. Crowley required a house with a door opening to the north, outside which there had to be a terrace that he could cover with fine river sand, and a ‘lodge’ where the spirits could congregate. He searched throughout most of 1899, and finally found what he wanted on the southern shore of Loch Ness, near Foyers—it was called Boleskine House, and its owner was willing to rent it. Crowley decided to follow Mathers’ practice and award himself a title: he called himself the Laird of Boleskine and Abertarff, and purchased the appropriate tartan. Then Frater Perdurabo—the magical name given him by the Golden Dawn—began preparing the talismans he would need for the Abra-Melin ritual. The immediate result was a strange shadow that made it necessary to use artificial light, even on the brightest day. After that, the house ‘became peopled with shadowy shapes’, and a friend who had come to stay with him was suddenly seized with panic, and left without saying goodbye. Then, as mentioned earlier in this book, his coachman became an alcoholic, his housekeeper vanished, and a workman went mad and tried to kill Crowley. Still the Laird persisted with his invocations, and practised kabbalistic techniques of astral travel, seeing visions of fire angels, earth spirits and other elementals.

  But Crowley was not the kind of person to persist in fasting, prayer and meditation for six months—not to mention abstinence from sex. He became bored with trying to ‘uplift the standard of Sacrifice and Sorrow’, and began to brood vengefully on his fellow magicians of the Golden Dawn. They were definitely hostile. Mathers had initiated Crowley into a higher grade in Paris, and they felt it should have been done in consultation with the London Lodge. So when Crowley applied for the documents to which he believed he was entitled, he was refused. Julian Baker admitted that he thought Mathers was behaving badly. The actress Florence Farr, who was nominally in charge of the London group, felt that she could no longer be Mather's representative and sent him a letter offering her resignation. Mathers scented defiance, and sent her an angry letter in the course of which he denounced Wynn Westcott, the original founder of the Golden Dawn, and accused him of forging the original ‘Sprengel’ documents. This meant that, in effect, the London Lodge was based on a lie. But this did not apply to the Paris Lodge, for Mathers himself had been in contact with the Secret Chiefs since 1892, and had founded a ‘Second Order’ under their direction. All this aroused rage and consternation in London.

  Crowley immediately wrote to Mathers, offering his full support, and his fortune as well. Then he rushed off to Paris, where he had no difficulty persuading Mathers to appoint him his representative in dealing with the London Lodge. Crowley had no doubt that Mathers had every right to be as high-handed as he pleased. He writes typically: ‘My own attitude was unhampered by any ethical considerations…Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.’ The London ‘rebels’ deserved to be squashed like beetles. (Crowley also seems to have taken the colonel's wife with him on this trip to Paris, as a reward for giving Bennett the £100.) Then he hurried back to London, chortling at the idea of getting his own back on the people who had snubbed him. His chief task was to interrogate all the ‘rebels’ and force them to sign a pledge of loyalty to Mathers. His immediate purpose was to seize the temple—or vault—in which members were initiated into the Second Order (it was supposed to be a replica of the vault in which the body of the legendary Christian Rosenkreuz, founder of the Rosicrucians, had been found in 1604). Crowley engaged a chucker-out from a pub in Leicester Square, then went, together with his latest mistress, Elaine Simpson, to the rooms in Blythe Road, Hammersmith. The lady who was there sent a frantic telegram to another Golden Dawn member named Hunter; he and Florence Farr arrived to find Crowley asserting that he was now in possession of the vault. A constable was sent for, who persuaded Crowley to leave. The next day, he was back wearing Highland dress, with a black mask over his face and a dagger at his side. This time, Yeats was there with Hunter, and refused Crowley admittance. Again a policeman was sent for, and again Crowley and his mistress were ordered to leave. The chucker-out finally arrived—having got lost en route—too late to support Crowley. In a letter to Lady Gregory, Yeats
explained that they had been forced to throw Mathers out of the Order, after he had sent one ‘Crowley, a quite unspeakable person’, to try to seize the headquarters. He explained that they had refured to admit Crowley into the Second Order ‘because we did not think a mystical society was intended to be a reformatory.’

  Next Crowley tried the law, but the case was dismissed, and Crowley had to pay costs. Crowley went back to Paris to report to Mathers, and declared triumphantly that ‘the rebel camp’ had broken up in anarchy. Crowley wrote in the Confessions: ‘They issued various hysterical manifestos, distinguished by confusion of thought, inaccuracy of statement, personal malice, empty bombast and ignorance of English.’ To justify the latter jibe he quotes the rebels as saying ‘nothing shall effect our connection’, and explains condescendingly: ‘The poor dears meant affect.’ It can be seen that Crowley was not yet ready to undertake six months of purification and prayer.

  The Abra-Melin ritual has to be started after Easter, and since Crowley had a month or so to spare, he decided to leave the scene of past humiliations and go abroad. At Mathers’ home he met two Golden Dawn members who had just returned from Mexico. They made it sound an interesting place; so he sailed for New York. By the time he reached there, Easter was behind him, and another chance of meeting his Holy Guardian Angel had been lost.

  After three days of sweating in a heat wave, Crowley took a train to Mexico City. At first he loathed the place—it seemed totally inefficient, and it was almost impossible to find anything appetising to eat or drink. But when he had rented a house overlooking the Alameda park, and hired an Indian girl to provide for his domestic and sexual needs, he began to like the laissez faire attitude of the Mexicans. He obtained an introduction to a local magical order, presided over by an old man called Don Jesus Medina, who was sufficiently impressed by Crowley's knowledge of the Kabbalah to initiate him through all its thirty-three grades in a matter of weeks. Crowley also established his own magical order, the Lamp of the Invisible Light, and initiated Don Jesus. His Ritual of Self Initiation involved ‘the working up of spiritual enthusiasm by means of a magical dance’ which induced giddiness. Crowley claimed:

  I used to set my will against the tendency to giddiness and thus postpone as long as possible the final physical intoxication. In this way I lost consciousness at a moment when I was wholly absorbed in aspiration. Thus, instead of falling into a dull darkness, I emerged into a lucid state, in which I was purged of personality and all sensory or intellectual impressions. I became the vehicle of the divine forces invoked, and so experienced Godhead.

  But he admits that his results did not aid his personal progress ‘since I had not formulated any intellectual link between the divine and human consciousness.’

  All this makes it clear that, in spite of his instability of character, Crowley had a genuinely deep interest in magic. Sixty years later, he would have undoubtedly been an enthusiastic experimenter with psychedelic drugs. As it was, he was fascinated by other means of ‘altering consciousness.’ He had learned enough from Mathers to know how to produce certain strange effects, and he indulged himself with enthusiasm. He claimed to have learned the trick of making himself invisible, although it was only partially successful, and his physical image in a mirror became blurry and faint instead of disappearing. But he was convinced that the real secret of invisibility is a form of telepathy which somehow prevents other people from noticing you. (The playwright Strindberg held the same belief.) ‘For example, I was able to take a walk in the street in a golden crown and a scarlet robe without attracting attention.’

  Even Crowley was aware that his real problem was that he lacked the personal dedication necessary to be a true magician—that is, an explorer of the outer limits of consciousness. ‘I felt instinctively that my pious predecessors were wrong in demanding the suppression of manhood…’ His solution was to wear over his heart ‘a certain jewelled ornament of gold’ (presumably a magically-consecrated talisman) whose purpose was to prevent him from thinking thoughts that might hinder his magical operations. When he took it off, he was allowed to think, and do, whatever he liked. It turned him, he admits, into a kind of Jekyll and Hyde. He was rather in the position of a person who wished to become a Catholic priest while at the same time keeping several mistresses. It never seems to have struck him that there was a fundamental self-deception involved.

  Symonds has a penetrating comment about Crowley at this period of his life, and it goes to the heart of Crowley's personality problem:

  He needed some strong or horrific experience to get ‘turned on.’ Most people are ‘turned on’ by sitting at home with a book, listening to music, or looking at a painting. Crowley needed his Mexican whore with the worn face before he could write his verses about Tannhauser. In this sense, then, I say that he lacked imagination. As the course of his life shows, he went to great lengths to be stimulated; he could never get enough of fantastic adventures; the message didn't come through otherwise.

  The result is that Crowley's life produces on most readers the effect of an endless breathless gabble like a recorded tape accelerated to several times its proper speed. The effect of the next four or five chapters of his Confessions is certainly that of a vertiginous travelogue. Eckenstein arrived in Mexico, and they went mountaineering together, climbing Popacatapetl at a gallop, with an unhappy newspaper reporter—who had expressed his doubts about their climbing abilities—hitched between them. He went through Texas, which he found barbarous and horribly commercial. He travelled from San Francisco to Hawaii, and on Waikiki beach met a married woman with whom he had a love affair, celebrated in a sequence of poems called Alice, An Adultery. In spite of its title, it contains some moving love poetry. And a long poem called The Argonauts is the most ambitious he ever attempted, ‘a lyric poem in which everything in the world should be celebrated in detail.’ He admits that it was inspired by the American passion for tall buildings and vast processions. It contains some of Crowley's best verse:

  I hear the waters faint and far

  And look to where the Polar Star,

  Half hidden in the haze, divides

  The double chanting of the tides;

  But, where the harbour's gloomy mouth

  Welcomes the stranger to the south,

  The water shakes, and all the sea

  Grows silver suddenly.

  It may sound more like Robert Service than Swinburne or Wilde, but it has an irresistable forward rhythm.

  Crowley paused in Hong Kong to renew acquaintance with the mistress who had helped him defy the London rebels, but was shocked to find that she had used her magical robes to win first prize at a fancy dress ball. Disillusioned, he went on to Ceylon via Singapore and Penang. In Colombo, he found Alan Bennett sitting at the feet of a Hindu guru, to whom Crowley took an instant dislike. He persuaded Bennett to leave with him for the healthier climate of Kandy, where he rented a bungalow. And here, at last, he was to settle down to the study of a subject to which he could respond with wholehearted enthusiasm: yoga, which he defined as ‘a scientific system for attaining a definite psychological state.’ The problem with magic was that Crowley was never quite free of the desire to attain his own ends and, in this respect, his ‘guru’ Mathers set a thoroughly bad example. But Alan Bennett—‘the noblest and gentlest soul I have ever known’—was a different matter. Towards Bennett, Crowley felt none of that persistent rivalry that characterised his relationship with other males (and made it practically impossible for him to maintain a friendship). So for the next few weeks he studied the techniques of yoga under Bennett's instructions and, according to his own account, succeeded in attaining the first state of trance, known as Dhyana, a state in which the percipient and the perceived have become one. Crowley had another motive for persisting in his yogic studies—he believed it could be used ‘to produce genius at will.’ The chapter in which he describes these ideas (twenty-nine) is one of the most interesting in The Confessions, and demonstrates clearly that, whatever his
faults as a human being, Crowley was undoubtedly no fraud as a student of techniques for transforming consciousness.

  By this time, Bennett had made up his mind to become a Buddhist monk. He and Crowley took leave of one another, and Crowley went on to India, where he intended to join Eckenstein for an attempt to climb K2, also known as Chogo-Ri. He hated Calcutta as much as Texas, and his comments about it reveal that he continued to regard himself as a simple-souled idealist:

  My cynical disgust with the corrupt pettiness of humanity, far from being assuaged by the consciousness of my ability to outmanoeuvre it, saddened me. I loved mankind; I wanted everybody to be an enthusiastic aspirant to the absolute. I expected everyone to be as sensitive about honour as I was myself. My disillusionment drove me more and more to determine that the only thing worth doing was to save humanity from its own ignorant heartlessness.

  But apart from his disillusionment with the crowds in the cities, the craving for adventure was stirring again. Bennett was in a monastery on the south coast of Burma, and Crowley heard that the journey across the Arakan hills was ‘reputedly so deadly that it has only been accomplished by very few men.’ He and a companion sailed for Rangoon, then took a steamer up the Irrawaddy River to Mindon. But when the headman told him that the coolies refused to go because the journey was too dangerous, he and his companion hired a dugout canoe and went downriver. Crowley was in a fever from malaria, and felt that the jungle was speaking to him of the world beyond material manifestations, and sleeping under a tree, he felt himself embraced by its elemental spirit—‘a woman vigorous and intense’—who kept him awake all night in ‘a continuous sublimity of love.’ As they continued downstrean, the nature mystic spent the day shooting at every bird he saw. A duck that seemed unkillable so enraged him that he insisted on going ashore to stalk it; his shot missed and it flew downstream. Then the bird made the mistake of flying overhead, and Crowley shot it from below so that it fell with a flop into the river. The episode reveals that manic persistence that made him such a bad enemy.