Aleister Crowley Read online

  The accident happened as Crowley had foretold. There were six men on the rope—three Europeans and three coolies. A barefoot coolie slipped, dragging the next man with him. Pache and another coolie also slipped. Guillarmod and Righi tried to hold them, but it was impossible. Snow slipped from under their feet, causing an avalanche and soon they were also hurtling down the slope. Guillarmod was thrown into a crevasse, and succeeded in pulling the unconscious Righi from under the snow that covered him. But it proved impossible to dig the other men out of the snow. The other officer, Reymond, who was in Crowley's camp, heard their shouts and came to help with the rescue work. According to Crowley, Reymond told him he would call him if he needed help, which is hard to believe—surely it was obvious that they needed help if they were screaming? But Crowley, undoubtedly seething with resentment at the mutineers, turned over and went to sleep, no doubt muttering ‘Serves them right.’

  And now the two stories of the expedition diverge completely. According to Crowley, Guillarmod now recognized that his leader had been right all along, and became very friendly. Then Crowley gave orders to Righi about bringing down his belongings, and sent for more porters to dig out the corpses. Then he went off to Darjeeling. Guillarmod's story, as reported by Symonds, is that Crowley descended the mountain at dawn the next day, passing straight by them as if he failed to see them. Crowley says he heard voices, and shouted in reply, but received no answer. So he left the expedition. In fact, it seems fairly clear that Crowley simply deserted the expedition, leaving the mutineers to ‘stew in their own juice.’ He cabled an inaccurate account of the expedition to the Daily Mail in London, using to release his bile against the Alpine Club. Symonds comments: ‘If it was Crowley's intention to make himself odious in the eyes of all mountaineers, he succeeded completely.’

  What is so astounding here is the incredibly bad judgement that Crowley showed. As far as mountaineers were concerned, to fail to go to the rescue of colleagues in danger was the unforgiveable sin. But Crowley might have got away with it if he had pleaded—as he actually did—that it was some kind of misunderstanding, then hurried down the mountain at dawn to help in the rescue. By simply walking off the mountain he was guilty of dereliction of duty, and no excuse could then save him from being regarded as a ‘cad.’ Worse still, he then returned to Darjeeling, and withdrew most of the expedition's funds from the bank (they had been mostly supplied by the others) then wrote a series of self-justifying articles in an Indian newspaper.

  The matter is important because it was symptomatic of Crowley's most fundamental weakness: his laziness. He admits in the Confessions that ‘it is part of my character to rest on my oars when a spurt would take me past the post’, but he manages to make it sound like some kind of modesty, the British gentleman's indifference to winning the game. In fact, it was a childish tendency to abandon any responsibility the moment he felt the first sign of boredom. He simply refused to do anything he didn't like doing, no matter how much inconvenience it caused to others. In a word, he was utterly spoilt. And in the long run, Crowley himself was the chief sufferer, for he acquired himself such a bad reputation that it surrounded him like an unpleasant smell. It was the Chogo-Ri episode that first revealed this fundamental weakness—his tendency to quarrel with most other members of the expedition. But it was the Kanchenjunga expedition that brought it into the open, and placed Crowley's feet on the downhill slope that would end with complete social ostracism.

  In Darjeeling, Crowley had a ‘brief but intense liaison’ with a Nepali girl named Tenguft, and proceeded to study the Persian language, since he intended to visit Persia on his way back to England. After that, he spent some time as the guest of the Maharajah of Moharbhanj and spent some time shooting bears and tigers—he was disappointed that he was not allowed to shoot elephants. He then wrote a pornographic treatise on mysticism called The Scented Garden, which he describes modestly in the Confessions as ‘this spurt of genius’. All this, he admits, was in open defiance of the Secret Chiefs, who were anxious for him to get on with his major task: to bring the new religion to birth. When they picked him to do their work, ‘they meant me to get busy and do it’; they wanted him to tackle the problem of his relation with the universe ‘as seriously as the Buddha had done twenty-five centuries ago.’ So they arranged to administer a sharp reminder. One evening in Calcutta, Crowley set out by himself to find a bazaar, and in a dark street, was attacked by a band of robbers in white robes. Fortunately, Crowley's hand was on his loaded revolver, so even as they pinioned his arms, he was able to pull the trigger. The men let go, and Crowley found himself free. Hurrying away from the dark alley, he recollected his earlier experiments in making himself invisible, and decided to try again. According to Crowley, it worked, and he was able to pass through the excited crowds without being noticed. In The Great Beast, Symonds quotes from the Calcutta Standard, whose headline read: ‘Alleged Assault on European—Two Men Shot.’ A reward of a hundred rupees was offered for the arrest of the European. Crowley only admits to firing one shot, but it seems more likely that, as was his custom, he blasted away wildly until the gun was empty.

  The next day, 29 October 1905, his wife and daughter arrived; Crowley informed her that they were leaving immediately; offered a choice of China or Persia, she chose China, on the grounds that she was fed up with Omar Khayam. So they engaged a nurse for the baby, and fled.

  They sailed for Rangoon, where Crowley left his wife and daughter in a hotel while he went to stay with Alan Bennett, with whom he discussed his spiritual quest. Then he and Rose sailed up the Irrawaddy to Mandalay. At Bhamo, an official kept him waiting for seventeen days for his passport, until Crowley went over his head and obtained the permission he required; in the Confessions he prints a long, sarcastic letter he wrote to the official, which reveals again that Crowley was inclined to nurse his grudges. Finally they crossed the frontier into China. It was a country that brought out some of Crowley's worst qualities. He explains that ‘one cannot fraternise with the Chinese of the lower orders—one must treat them with absolute contempt and callousness.’ And since these contemptible creatures respected a traveller insofar as he was overbearing, haughty and avaricous, Crowley had an excuse for behaving at his worst.

  In Tengyueh, Crowley found another father figure—the British Consul, Litton, whom Crowley compares to Sir Richard Burton, and acknowledges that he learned more from Litton about China than he had learned in the whole of his previous life. But the relationship was brief—Litton soon died of some mysterious disease, possibly poisoned, and Crowley had the pleasure of flogging a Bengali doctor—‘a burly nigger of the most loathesome type’—with a rawhide whip to force him to examine the body. They were able to reach no decision about the cause of Litton's death, and Crowley and Rose set off, surrounded by ominous rumours of native uprisings (it was the time of the Boxer rebellion) and murdered Europeans, for the Chinese interior. By this time the baby's nurse had run away with one of the muleteers, and Crowley had engaged a drunken Chinese interpreter.

  Crowley's account of the ‘walk across China’ is a pleasant travelogue (‘We crossed the Salween by means of a bridge ornamented with shrines and a delightful and romantically beautiful house for the toll keeper’) punctuated by Crowley's opinions on aesthetics, Chinese cooking, opium and the stupidity of Europeans. He concluded that opium was a harmless and much maligned drug. ‘The pictures drawn as to its effects are evidently coloured by the bias of the observer.’ So he ‘purchased the necessary apparatus’ and learned to smoke it. On the day after New Year they crossed the Mekong into what is now Vietnam. Food was often scarce and they were occasionally forced to live for days on rice, Worcester sauce and dried milk. Crowley was disappointed that he had no opportunity to shoot a peacock. There was increasing friction between Crowley and his servants, which Crowley fails to explain, but which was no doubt due to his tendency to treat the Chinese with ‘absolute contempt and callousness.’ The interpreter, a Chinese named Johnny White, registere
d his own protest by riding off on Crowley's pony, which was considerable better than his own ‘sorry screw.’ It was the wrong thing to do to a man as touchy and vengeful as Crowley, who managed to catch up with him unperceived, while he was crossing a thorny hillside. Crowley jerked him into a large thorn bush, and left him struggling there while his own coolies rode past, administering a blow from his whip as each man passed. ‘I had no more trouble of any kind for the rest of the journey to Yunnanfu’, he records with malignant satisfaction.

  By the time they reached Manhao, where Crowley was due to pay off his coolies, they were becoming ‘mutinous’; he accordingly worked out a scheme to get his own back. Once he and Rose and their servant were installed in the boat, Crowley ‘proceeded to pay the head man the exact sum due to him, less certain fines.’ The coolies were enraged and called on the villagers to support them. As they faced ‘thirty or forty yelling maniacs’, Crowley ordered the Hindu servant to cast off the boat; understandably he was reluctant, so Crowley threatened to shoot him unless he obeyed. A few minutes later, Crowley looked back with satisfaction as the current carried him away from the infuriated coolies; it was the kind of triumph he relished.

  En route to Hong Kong, Crowley decided that he and Rose would return to England in opposite directions; he would go via Shangai and America, while Rose could return via Calcutta and pick up their luggage. He mentions this decision in the Confessions in the most casual way, as if it was perfectly normal to leave one's wife and child in the middle of Asia. What he takes care not to mention at this point is that he was going via Shanghai to call on his ex-mistress Elaine Simpson—the one who had worn her ceremonial robes to a fancy dress party. As it turned out, Elaine, whose magical name was Sister Fidelis, lived up to her name and refused to be unfaithful to her husband. His guardian angel Aiwas, invoked by magical ceremonies, warned Crowley that Elaine would give him a great deal of trouble, and that he ought to break with her. Yet, paradoxically, Aiwas also advised him to make love to her, which seems to suggest that he was expressing Crowley's own desires. Frustrated and suffering from a bad cold, Crowley took a boat for Japan and Canada. He arrived back in England in early June, 1906, where he found letters awaiting him telling him that his daughter had died of typhoid in Rangoon.

  Five

  The Master and the Disciples

  FOR CROWLEY, 1906 was a year of disasters. Soon after his return, he had to have an operation to remove an infected gland in his groin. Then he picked up a chill in his right eye, which required more operations, all unsuccessful. This was followed by neuralgia that continued for months. Finally, an ulcerated throat laid him low for the rest of the year.

  He had also discovered, rather too late, that his wife was a dipsomaniac—which enabled him to achieve the recognition that she was entirely to blame for the baby's death, having failed to sterilize the feeding bottle when drunk. He also reached the curious conclusion that Rose's mother was to blame for having allowed her children to drink champagne in childhood. So he ‘took the hag by the shoulders’ and kicked her downstairs. Symonds has the interesting remark:

  1907…was the year that he ‘went wrong’—or so he said during the 1920s in an anxious and melancholy period of his life. I think he meant that in 1907 there was still time for him to turn back. Rose had given birth to a daughter, Lola Zaza. He was thirty-two years of age. His roving boisterous past could be set aside as the Sturm und Drang period of his life. He had still a chance of settling down and getting on with the business of ordinary living; but he kicked his mother-in-law downstairs instead…and strode on, into the Waste Land, praising the immortal gods.

  There is considerable penetration in this comment. Crowley's money was running out, so there were good practical reasons for settling down and thinking seriously about the future. But Crowley had become an addict, not to drugs or alcohol, but to magic. He had experienced strange mental states and extraordinary visions. He was convinced that he was aware of a whole dimension of existence of which ordinary people are ignorant and, on the whole, he was probably right. Moreover, since his experience in Cairo in 1904, he was also convinced that he was the Chosen One who was due to inaugurate a new era in the history of mankind. And since he was to be the new saviour, he had to become a kind of symbolic Everyman, and fling himself whole-heartedly into the experiences of this world:

  …the mission, in order to carry out for which I was incarnated, was a mission to mankind; and this must explain why, pari passu [at an equal rate] with my personal progress, I walked continually in the way of the world. My spiritual life was now therefore definitely duplex, and this fact must be kept in mind if my subsequent actions are to be properly understood.

  This vision of his destiny had been confirmed in Shanghai, when he had invoked his Holy Guardian Angel. Aiwas ordered him to return to Egypt with Ouarda (Rose). ‘There I will give thee signs…Thus you shall get real power, that of God, the only one worth having. Illumination shall come by means of power, pari passu.’

  Another commentator on Crowley, Jean Overton Fuller, suggests that Aiwas was actually some demonic entity sent to tempt Crowley, and points out that the voice came from over Crowley's left shoulder—the left-hand path being the path of black magic. But it seems just as likely that Aiwas was the voice of Crowley's own unconscious mind (a suspicion reinforced by Aiwas's use of ‘pari passu’—not a phrase one would expect from an ancient Sumerian deity).

  At least this enables us to understand why Crowley found the idea of domestic felicity intolerable. The avatar of the future religion, the chosen one of the Secret Masters, was treading the path of ‘real power’, the power of the gods. And in spite of lack of general recognition, he had no doubt whatever about his own stature; in fact, lack of general recognition only led him to praise himself more vigorously:

  I had become so accustomed to columns of eloquent praise from the most important people in the world of letters, which had not sold a dozen copies; to long controversial criticism from such men as G.K. Chesterton…People acquiesced in me as the only living poet of any magnitude…Yet hardly anyone had read any of my work and the intrigues of my enemies had made it impossible for me to make myself heard…

  So as his fortunes seemed to be in decline, he became more determined than ever to batter the world into a recognition of his genius. And it was at this point that Crowley received a visit from a soldier who had served in the Boer War, Captain John Frederick Charles Fuller who—amazingly enough—had read some of Crowley's work and decided he was a poet of genius. By way of publicising his work, Crowley had offered a prize of £100 for the best essay on it. Fuller was the only person who decided to compete. When the two men met at a hotel in the Strand, they found themselves immediately in tune. Fuller had been a member of the Rationalist Association, and took a Nietzschean view of the harmfulness of Christianity. Yet he and Crowley were united in detesting the Marxists and others who wanted social revolution. ‘We felt ourselves to be leaders…’

  But these views were still a long way from Crowley's notion of himself as the founder of a new religion. How Crowley persuaded Fuller to regard him as the successsor to Jesus Christ and Mohammed, as well as the greatest poet in the English language, is still a matter of mystery. We can only assume that Fuller was another example of that unique phenomenon, the English eccentric, who doesn't give a damn about the opinions of his fellow Englishmen. It was, in any case, a fair bet that none of his fellow Indian army officers would ever read The Star in the West, ‘A Critical Essay upon the Works of Aleister Crowley’, which appeared in 1907. Crowley remarks: ‘The style of The Star in the West is trenchant and picturesque. Its only fault is a tendency to overloading.’ This is an understatement. Here is the opening paragraph of the introduction:

  At first sight it may appear to the casual reader of this essay, that the superscription on its cover [i.e. the title] is both froward and perverse, and contrary to the sum of human experience. This however I trust he will find is not the case and, as Ianthe,
will discover that after the mystic union has been consummated, the beautiful daughter of Ligdus and Telethusa was as acceptable a young husband as ever wooed nymph on the shaded slopes of Ida.

  This was clearly not a work that would produce a revolution in the current estimates of Crowley. Crowley accordingly failed to pay Fuller the promised £100.

  Much of 1907 was spent wandering around the Mediterranean with a demented nobleman whom he calls the Earl of Coke and Crankum, and whom Symonds identifies as the Earl of Tankerville. The earl was suffering from paranoia, and believed that his wife was trying to murder him by witchcraft; he was introduced to Crowley in a chemist's shop where Crowley bought his alchemical supplies. ‘My plan in such cases is not to undeceive the patient’ says Crowley smoothly, and he proposed to teach the earl how to perform magic to defend himself. It seems clear that Crowley saw him as a heavensent answer to his own lack of funds; he suggested a ‘magical retirement’, and they crossed the channel to Paris, then went to Tangiers by way of Marseilles and Gibraltar. Crowley devotes a chapter of the Confessions to describing their adventures in Morocco. They returned via Granada, where Crowley had a passionate affair with a gypsy; the poem he wrote about it contains the memorable lines:

  For your hair was full of roses, and my flesh was full of thorns. And the midnight came upon us worth a million crazy morns.

  Inevitably, the earl's paranoia turned against Crowley; but in the autobiography, Crowley forgets to mention this, as the description of his gypsy love affair leads him to speak of other loves who provided inspiration for his poetry. It was left for Symonds to unearth a revealing comment made by Lord Tankerville to Crowley before they parted on bad terms: I'm sick of your teaching—teaching—teaching—as if you were God Almighty and I were a poor bloody shit in the street.’