Aleister Crowley Read online

  Once, in the first three weeks or so, Rose took some trifling liberty; I recognised the symptoms and turned her up and spanked her. She henceforth added the qualities of a perfect wife to those of a perfect mistress. Women, like all moral inferiors, behave well only when treated with firmness…

  All the same, ‘love filled the universe; there was no room for anything else.’ They went on to Paris, where they met Moina Mathers on a bridge; Crowley insists that she had become a prostitute, but this sounds unlikely. After that, they went on to Cairo where, to impress his wife, Crowley suggested spending a night in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid. Servants escorted them to the foot of the Grand Gallery; then they went on alone. In the King's Chamber, Crowley lit a candle, and began to read the preliminary invocation of the Goetia. Soon he realised that it was not necessary to peer at the page at close quarters; the chamber was full of a pale lilac glow—the ‘astral light.’ Crowley put out the candle and read on by the magical glow. Then they composed themselves to sleep on the hard floor, and spent an uncomfortable night. When they woke up, the light had vanished.

  After this, they sailed for Ceylon, and Crowley noted with satisfaction that Rose fascinated every man who met her, ‘a Helen of Troy or a Cleopatra.’ He wrote a series of love poems to her, Rosa Mundi, and felt relieved that his poetic genius was returning (he was afraid that domestic happiness had stifled it forever). He also tramped around the jungle, blasting off at anything that moved and leaving a trail of slaughtered birds and animals behind. On the shores of a lake, he decided to shoot enough furry bats to make himself a waistcoat. His first shot filled the air with flapping wings. But one of the bats landed on Rose, and he had some trouble detaching its claws. That night, he was awakened by the noise of a squealing bat. When he looked up he saw Rose, completely naked, clinging with her arms and legs to the wooden frame that supported the mosquito net. When he pulled her down, she bit and spat and squealed; Crowley had to shake her awake. ‘It was the finest case of obsession that I had ever had the good fortune to observe.’

  When Rose discovered she was pregnant, they decided it was time to turn their footsteps towards home. In Cairo, Crowley decided to change his identity yet again. He admits this with some embarrassment in the Confessions, blaming ‘the intoxicated infatuation of my hymeneal happiness’ for his decision to ‘play a puerile part on the world's stage.’ Lord Boleskine (as he had been calling himself since his marriage) proceeded to don Persian garb and pretend to be an oriental prince, Chioi Khan, ‘being Hebrew for the Beast’. (It is at this point in the autobiography that Crowley informs us that his mother believed he was the Beast—number 666—in Apocalypse; this sounds like one of his spontaneous inventions.) Crowley also wrote to Rose's parents informing them that in future all correspondence must be addressed to ‘Princess Chioi Khan’, and when Mrs Kelly added an exclamation mark after the title, Crowley returned her letter unopened.

  Now, at last, Crowley returned to the study of magic; a ‘sheik’ who taught him Arabic also—‘on discovering that I was an initiate’—provided him with books and manuscripts on the Arabic Cabbala, and taught him how to eat live scorpions, lick a red hot sword, and run a stiletto through his cheek without drawing blood.

  Chapter forty-nine of the Confessions begins: ‘This chapter is the climax of this book.’ He also regarded it as the climax of his life. It describes how he received the curious ‘scripture’ known as The Book of the Law.

  The Crowleys took a flat in Cairo, and Crowley tried to conjure up sylphs (spirits of the air) by repeating the invocation that had produced such an extraordinary effect in the Great Pyramid. Rose failed to see them, but sank into a curious state of mind in which she kept on repeating: ‘You have offended Horus’, which puzzled Crowley, since her knowledge of Egyptian mythology was almost non-existent. He was baffled and rather annoyed when she proceeded to tell him how to invoke Horus, by methods that struck him as ‘pure rubbish.’ But when she took him into the Boulak Museum next door, and showed him a stele containing the image of Horus, in a form known as Ra-Hoor-Khuit, he began to be convinced. It began to look as if the Secret Chiefs of the Golden Dawn were trying to contact him—presumably with a view to making him their intermediary instead of Mathers. On 19 March, 1904, at midnight, he made the invocation according to his wife's instructions (he was now calling her Ouarda the Seeress) and was told through her that ‘the equinox of the gods had come, that a new epoch in human history had begun, and that he was to form a link between solar-spiritual forces and mankind.’ In other words, Crowley had been chosen as the new Messiah.

  Rose told him that the messages came from an entity who identified himself as Aiwas, Crowley's Holy Guardian Angel—the spirit Crowley had been trying to invoke with the unfinished ritual of Abra-Melin the Mage. Now Aiwas told Crowley (through Rose) that he was to go into his workroom at precisely midday on 8, 9 and 10 April and to write down what he heard for the next hour. What Crowley heard, or so he claims, was a ‘musical and expressive’ voice dictating a message for mankind. The message began, somewhat obscurely: ‘Had! The manifestation of Nuit.’ According to Crowley, this meant ‘Motion, the manifestation of matter.’ It went on: ‘The unveiling of the company of heaven. Every man and woman is a star. Every number is infinite; there is no difference.’ ‘Every man and woman is a star’ means, according to Crowley, that every man and woman is unique and remarkable, while ‘Every number is infinite’ means that every individual is the Ultimate God. But this spirit of tolerance towards all mankind is contradicted by much of the text that follows, which is élitist—in fact, Nietzschean, in tone. ‘These are dead, these fellows; they feel not. We are not for the poor and sad: the lords of the earth are our kinsfolk…Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, force and fire, are of us.’ It sounds like an extract from Thus Spake Zarathustra, except for the Swinburnian phrase about delicious languor.

  Crowley argues that The Book of the Law supplants all previous religions, and that, unlike other holy scriptures, it contains the proofs of its own authenticity within itself. This is a claim that is impossible to take seriously. Passage after passage sounds exactly like the Crowley of The Tale of Archais and Rosa Mundi:

  I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky. To me! To me! Thou art exhaust in the voluptuous fullness of the inspiration; the expiration is sweeter than death, more rapid and laughterful than a caress of Hell's own worm. I am in secret fourfold word, the blasphemy against all gods of men. Curse them! Curse them! Curse them! With my Hawk's head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross…Let Mary inviolate be torn upon wheels: for her sake let all chaste women be despised among you!

  Bahlasti! Omnedha! I spit on your crapulous creeds.

  All this sounds too much Crowley in his best Marquis de Sade vein to be accepted as a communication from an extraterrestrial intelligence. In a comment added later, Crowley makes the ‘priest of the princes Ankh-f-n-Khonsu’ declare that the study of this book is forbidden, and suggesting that it should be burned after a first reading. Charles Cammell took this so seriously that he burned the copy inscribed to him by Crowley. But it is hard to see why Aiwas bothered to dictate it if its study was forbidden; it sounds like another attempt by Crowley to stake its claim as a supernaturally-conceived scripture. And as a piece of sacred scripture, it often makes an unfortunate impression, like some parody of fin de siècle prose by Max Beerbohm:

  Hold! Hold! Bear up in thy rapture; fall not in a swoon of the excellent kisses. Harder! Hold up thyself! Lift thine head! Breathe not so deep—die! Ah! Ah! What do I feel? Is the word exhausted?

  His guardian angel also advised Crowley to ‘take wine and strange drugs…and be drunk thereof’, promising that ‘thy death shall be lovely—whoso seeth it shall be glad.’ In fact, following this advice was to be Crowley's ruination, so that his death was anything but lovely. But the suggestion is certainly in conformity with the central doctrine of
The Book of the Law: ‘There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.’ This seems to be an echo of Rabelais's Gargantua, in which there is an abbey that has inscribed above its door ‘Do what you will’ (Fay ce que vouldras), and this seems to be confirmed by the fact that the abbey is called Thélème, and The Book of the Law states: ‘The word of the law is Thelema.’ Crowley's guardian angel may also have had in mind Blake's lines from The Everlasting Gospel:

  Do what you will, this life's a fiction

  And is made up of contradiction

  —an attitude which is certainly consistent with Crowley's moral philosophy. Yet echoes of Rabelais's sixteenth century anticlericalism sound as much out of place in this ‘sacred scripture’ as the reminders of Swinburne and Nietzsche. Symonds hits the nail squarely on the head when he writes:

  The Book of the Law lacks the numinosity or authority of prophetic writings; and its rebellious sentiments exude an atmosphere incompatible with the ‘praeter-human intelligence’ which Aiwas was supposed to be.

  All this may seem to suggest that Crowley concocted The Book of the Law to stake his claim as Mathers’ successor and the founder of Crowleyanity. Yet no one who reads Crowley's endless essays and commentaries on it can maintain such a view. Nothing is more obvious than that Crowley believed totally in The Book of the Law as some kind of supernatural inspiration, and as his chief claim to be remembered by future generations. The main problem for the average reader—particularly of The Great Beast—is that Crowley seems such an intolerable show-off that it is hard to believe anything he says. But then, a biography like Symonds’ leaves out a whole dimension of Crowley's life. (He makes a more consistent attempt at understanding in its sequel, The Magic of Aleister Crowley.) It is impossible to understand Crowley unless we grasp that, like Madame Blavatsky and Mathers and Yeats and Florence Farr, he took magic as seriously as Lord Rutherford took atomic physics. Literary commentators often make the same mistake about Yeats: that he regarded magic as a romantic exercise in suspension of disbelief. Yeat's magical notebooks reveal this to have been untrue; they go into overwhelming detail about magical procedures and symbols, and show that he continued to be obsessed by it long after he ceased to be a member of the Golden Dawn.

  Crowley, for all his inclination to embroider the truth, undoubtedly obtained certain results—both at Boleskine and in Cairo—that convinced him that he had the makings of a great magician. It may be that these results were not at all what he supposed them to be; that when he thought he was communicating with his guardian angel or some ancient Egyptian god, he was only establishing contact with some loquacious disembodied intelligence whose only talent was telling Crowley what he wanted to hear. Those who find the idea of disembodied intelligences impossible to accept may prefer to believe that Aiwas, Horus and the rest were projections of Crowley's unconscious mind. Nevertheless the one thing that seems relatively certain is that they were not pure invention.

  The most sensible hypothesis about The Book of the Law is that it was largely a product of Crowley's own mind, but that he received it in a way that convinced him that he was only the amanuensis. His central claim about the work is that it opens up communication with discarnate intelligences. But when he goes on to quote it on the subject of food, drink and lovemaking (‘eat rich foods and drink sweet wines and wines that foam! Also, take your fill of love as ye will, when, where and with whom ye will!’) and to explain that ‘the emancipation of mankind from all limitations whatever is one of the main precepts of the Book’, the reader recognises that Crowley really means ‘emancipation from the Victorian limitations that made my childhood so miserable’, and that this was the one limitation that Crowley never succeeded in escaping from. Because of this obsession with the Plymouth Brothers and their intellectual and moral limitations, Crowley based his personal religion on a premise that would not take in an averagely intelligent schoolboy: that since there is no such thing as sin, everyone should feel free to indulge himself as much as he likes. This might work if all human beings were highly intelligent and self-disciplined, but at our present stage of social evolution, it would obviously be a disaster. And the fact that Aiwas—or whoever dictated The Book of the Law—shared this disastrous misconception seems to indicate that his intelligence fell well short of the superhuman.

  Crowley admits that he also had his misgivings. But these were not about the philosophical implications of The Book of the Law, but about his own adequacy to carry out ‘a mission of such importance that the last event in the world's history of importance even approaching it was Mohammed's…’ All the same, he lost no time, when he arrived in Paris, in writing to Mathers to inform him that secret chiefs had now appointed him as the head of the order. Mathers ignored it, and Crowley says ‘I declared war on Mathers accordingly.’

  Back in Boleskine, ‘life passed like an ecstatic dream’—at least, until Mathers began to mount a magical attack. He succeeded in killing most of Crowley's pack of bloodhounds, and in making the servants ill. One of the servants suddenly became ‘maniacal’ and attacked Rose; Crowley drove him into the cellar with a salmon gaff and sent for the police. When Crowley finally evoked Beelzebub, the ‘magical attacks’ suddenly ceased. In July, Rose gave birth to a girl whom Crowley named Nuit Ma Athanoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith. To amuse Rose during her convalescence, he wrote an obscene novel, Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden. He also began to publish his many volumes of poetry in collected volumes, whose title page bore the imprint of the Society for Religious Truth. For Crowley, the real joke was that his jest contained more than a grain of truth.

  One of Crowley's former companions on Chogo-Ri came to stay—a Swiss named Jacot Guillarmod. Crowley amused himself by spinning an absurd yarn about a dangerous breed of wild sheep called the haggis, and when, one morning, his ghillie burst into the room crying ‘There's a haggis on the hill’, they all rushed out into the rain and spent an hour crawling uphill through the heather with their guns at the ready. The joke was finally on Crowley when Guillarmod blasted away into the mist and shot the local farmer's prize ram. Guillarmod had the ram's head stuffed and mounted.

  Guillarmod's purpose in coming to Boleskine was to persuade Crowley to go on another Himalayan expedition: this time to the world's third highest mountain, Kanchenjunga, merely a hundred feet lower than Chogo-Ri. Crowley agreed, but only on condition that he should be the leader of the expedition. According to Crowley Eckenstein declined to join them ‘for various reasons’, but according to Symonds, because Eckenstein declined to accept Crowley as a leader. No two accounts of the expedition could be more different than Crowley's and Symonds’; yet the weight of evidence seems to indicate that Symonds’ is more accurate. According to Crowley's version, the ascent of Kanchenjunga would have been a perfectly straightforward matter if Guillarmod had not broken his agreement to regard Crowley as the leader. Once Guillarmod became a rebel, and began to disaffect the others, everything began to go wrong.

  Symonds describes Crowley's view of Kanchenjunga as ‘optimistic to the point of blindness.’ The approach is barred by precipices down which swept continual avalanches. When Guillarmod studied the route Crowley proposed to take, he became convinced that it was impossible. He also claimed to be appalled by the brutal way Crowley treated the porters (over two hundred of them when the expedition started), and was convinced that this was the cause of the failure of the expedition.

  Crowley had left Boleskine in early May and arrived in Bombay a month later. Guillarmod had found two more alpinists willing to join them and pay their share of the costs: two Swiss officers named Alexis Pache and Charles Reymond. Crowley had enlisted a young Italian hotel manager named Righi, who could speak Hindustani and Tibetan. After a two-week march through the valleys of Nepal, they began the ascent on 22 August 1905. Three days later, differences of opinion had already developed, when Guillarmod found that Crowley had failed to provide the porters with suitable footwear, and that some of them were expected to walk barefoot on the glacier. Guillarmod
felt that the steps Crowley cut in the ice were dangerous; in fact, two days later, one of the porters lost his foothold on one of them, and fell to his death. Porters were now deserting in droves.

  On 31 August, a number of porters descended from Crowley's camp and told Guillarmod they were tired of being beaten by Crowley and were leaving; Guillarmod succeeded in persuading them to stay by promising them that henceforth Crowley would not lay a finger on them. (Crowley himself flatly denies striking any porter.) Guillarmod and Righi decided that the only solution was to depose Crowley from the leadership of the expedition. When they arrived at Crowley's camp the next day, there was a furious argument. In his own account, Crowley falls back on his usual explanation that Guillarmod had become mentally unstable, and suggests that the rebellion was nothing more than the resentment of foreigners being led by an Englishman. Unfortunately, this was the beginning of the end. Guillarmod declared that he was withdrawing from his agreement to regard Crowley as the leader, and said he was taking his contingent back down the mountain to the lower camp—in any case, there was not sufficient room for everyone to sleep at Crowley's camp. Crowley claims he warned the ‘mutineers’ that they would be killed if they went down that night. Pache decided to join them, his excuse being that the porter had failed to bring his bed; it seems more likely that he was also anxious to escape from Crowley. Crowley warned him that he would be dead within ten minutes.