Aleister Crowley (8 page)

Most Golden Dawn initiates hoped to attain the Knowledge and Conversation of their Holy Guardian Angel, a mystical meeting with their Higher Self associated with the
sephiroth
Tiphareth and the grade Adeptus Minor 5
⁰
= 6
. This was reached through performing the difficult Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, a medieval ritual Mathers had come upon in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal and which he had translated into English. This work would have a profound influence on Crowley, and more than one biographer has suggested that his downfall began with his attempt to perform it. But even his Holy Guardian Angel was only a milestone on Crowley’s magical ascent. Everything we know about him tells us he was heading for the Abyss.

Crowley rose through the ranks very quickly. Most of what he was required to learn as a Neophyte he already knew. The next hurdles, of Zealator, Theoricus, and Practicus, were no trouble, and by May 1899 he had reached the rank of Philosophus. The next grade, Adeptus Minor 5
⁰
= 6
, required a probationary period, and so Crowley had to cool his magical heels for a spell. By this time he had met the only member of the Golden Dawn for whom he retained any respect. After one ceremony he became aware of a powerful magical force, which seemed to emanate from a member he had yet to meet. Frater Iehi Aour
(“Let There Be Light”), otherwise known as Allan Bennett, had a reputation as a magician second only to Mathers. He approached Crowley and to Crowley’s surprise said, “Little Brother, you have been meddling with the Goetia!” Bennett must have had a keen intuition.
Goetia
means “howling” but it is also the term used for magic that deals with dark, unenlightened forces. Crowley denied this. Bennett then said, “In that case the Goetia has been meddling with you.” (Crowley believed that Yeats was casting spells at
him, because of his poetry, and probably felt Bennett’s remark confirmed this.)

Crowley had by this time decided to perform the Abramelin ritual. He had left his rooms at the Hotel Cecil and taken a flat at 67-69 Chancery Lane, a well-off street in the City of London. He had rented it under the name of Count Vladimir Svareff. Crowley says he took this alias for three reasons. One was that in order to perform the Abramelin magic properly, he had to cut himself off from his family. Another was his love for Russia. The other was as a sociological experiment. He knew how people reacted to a young man from Cambridge, but how would they react to a Russian nobleman? Crowley’s claim that he wanted to increase his knowledge of mankind has some merit, but it is difficult to believe that many people would really believe he was Russian. (He even issued another book of poetry,
Jezebel
, under that nom de plume; the reaction to it was much the same as to the earlier work by the gentleman from Cambridge.) Crowley’s explanation suggests an attempt to break out of his own limited perspective, but even as Count Svareff he was still Crowley pretending to be Russian. Mathers’s fantasy of being the Count of Glenstrae must have inspired him, and it is difficult not to see Count Svareff and the other alter egos Crowley adopted as another means of getting a response, and drawing attention to himself; Crowley always wanted his presence to be felt. George Cecil Jones, his tutor in magic, remarked that if he wanted solitude, he should have called himself Smith.

Abramelin the Mage’s magic—to give him his full title—cannot be performed just anywhere.
¹⁵
Certain conditions must be met. It is unlike other magical rituals and is much more like an Eastern meditative text. The invocations are much more like prayers. For six
months the aspirant must lead a holy and pure life and his mind must be focused on his sole objective. He must “inflame himself with prayer” and “invoke often.” As Israel Regardie writes, after finding a suitable place in which to perform the operation, one has little else to do except “aspire with increasing concentration and ardor . . . towards the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.”
¹⁶
It is only after this that the traditional demons, talismans, and other regulation magical paraphernalia get involved.

A two-bedroom flat in London’s City may not have been the best location for this holy exercise, but Count Svareff was determined to try. Crowley decked out his flat with two “temples,” one for white magic, the other for black. He said he did this in order to maintain the magical equilibrium, that confusing balancing act between good and evil he had started in 1886. The white temple was lined with six large mirrors. This was in order to reflect the energies he invoked back at him. The black temple was empty except for an altar held up by an ebony statue of an African standing on his hands. (Black magic, like antinomianism, is keen on reversals.) Crowley also kept a skeleton in a cupboard that he fed with blood, small birds, and tea, aiming to return it to life. All he managed, though, was some slime covering the bones. The day after meeting Allan Bennett, Crowley went to the South London slum where Bennett was sharing a flat with another Golden Dawn member. Looking at the squalor, Crowley suggested that, in exchange for magical instruction, Bennett come and live with him. Not surprisingly, Frater Iehi Aour accepted. He
must have been a good instructor. Soon after his arrival, life at Chancery Lane took a peculiar twist. All the conjurations, talismans, rituals, and other magical work started paying off. One night, returning from dinner with George Cecil Jones, Crowley found a rather large and
mysterious magical cat in his stairwell. His white temple had been broken into, the altar was overturned, and the furnishings were scattered about. Crowley says that 316 demons ran about the place, which suggests either very small demons or a very large flat.

Bennett took a number of drugs to help with his asthma—opium, morphine, cocaine, and chloroform—and it was with Bennett that Crowley first began to experiment with drugs. Bennett had a biting contempt for the body, and his health, always frail, was worsening. He needed to get to a warmer climate. Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was the place, as there he could also enter the path of the
bhikkhu
, a Buddhist monk—Bennett was losing his interest in magic and was increasingly drawn to the Buddhist path. Crowley had inherited a fortune, but magical etiquette prevented him from simply paying Bennett’s fare. Crowley says he could not pay
Bennett for his instructions, only give him room and board, yet why he couldn’t lend him the money is unclear. Crowley and Jones attempted to evoke the spirit of Buer, a demon of the Goetia, who deals with health, but were only partially successful. Then Crowley had an idea.

Initiation hadn’t dampened Crowley’s need for sex. He was having an affair with one initiate, Elaine Simpson (Soror Semper Fidelis
—
“Always Faithful”), and had proposed marriage to Susan Strong, an American opera singer he had met in Paris (she performed in one of Mathers’s Egyptian rites), but his proposal soon fizzled out. He was also enjoying himself with a “seductive siren” whose husband was a colonel in India; her name was Lilian Horniblow but she was known as Laura Grahame.
¹⁷
Crowley says he struggled to overcome his passion for her, but he more likely simply tired of her and broke it off. After Buer made a partial appearance, his siren wrote to him again, begging him to come to her hotel. Crowley saw a connection. He
visited Laura, and she begged him to come back to her. Crowley was noncommittal, but he offered her a chance to do something good for someone other than herself. He asked for a hundred pounds—a considerable sum then. He offered her no reason why, but said it wasn’t for him and that he had a private reason for not using his own money. His siren gave him the money, or possibly a ruby ring to sell—the accounts are unclear. He gave the cash to Bennett, and Frater Iehi Aour
made ready for warmer climes.
¹⁸

Crowley implies that Bennett’s benefactor later agreed to end their affair if he slept with her again—the inference is that he impregnated her (she asked for “a living memory of our love”) and she let him go to perform the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.
¹⁹
The “gift” that saved Bennett’s life would come back to haunt Crowley. His siren later thought better of her generosity and asked that it be returned; it is unclear if it was a gift or a loan. Either way, Crowley had no intention of returning anything and vindicated himself with rationalizations. Crowley was later accused of stealing a hundred pounds. Charges were not brought against him—he did not actually steal the money—but the mud stuck and would turn up years later during the anti-Crowley tabloid campaign.

Crowley decided that Chancery Lane was no place to meet his Holy Guardian Angel. He needed somewhere more secluded for so serious an assignation. The fact that his flat was under police observation because of suspected homosexual activity may have been a prompt—it was still illegal then—as may have been the rent, or perhaps he didn’t want to face the demons he had conjured without Frater Iehi Aour’s
help.
²⁰
(After he left, the magical atmosphere, he said, remained tense and the landlord had difficulty renting the place.) In any case, he searched high and low and in August 1899
found what he was looking for. Boleskine was a long, low building on the southeast rise overlooking Loch Ness, halfway between Inverfarigaig and Foyers in Scotland; years later, Jimmy Page bought the place, and today it remains a site of
thelemic
pilgrimage.
²¹
At the time Crowley moved in, the Loch Ness monster was yet to appear—the first sighting was in 1933—and one of the oddest explanations for Nessie’s existence (if she does exist) is that Crowley was somehow responsible. (I’m not sure if Crowley actually took credit for this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.) Boleskine seemed perfect for what he had in mind. The plan was to begin the ritual that coming Easter. He set up his home in November, bringing with him the magical mirrors of his white temple. He also started calling himself the Laird of Boleskine. From a Russian count he became a Scottish lord.

In between fishing, tramping on the moors, and seduction, Crowley also worked on his magic. It seemed the spirit world was aware of his intentions, because even before he began the Abramelin magic, things were afoot. The shadowy shapes that had visited Chancery Lane turned up in Scotland, but as before, Crowley could not harness them. They caused much mischief. His coachman, who abstained from alcohol, became a drunkard. When a psychic Crowley had shipped in returned to London, she gave up her calling and took to prostitution. One of his workmen tried to kill him, and a local butcher died when he accidentally sliced through his artery. Crowley had absentmindedly jotted down some demonic names on a butcher bill and the spirits took advantage of this. And there were other, less dangerous magical pursuits. Crowley invoked fire angels using one of the Enochian formulas of the Elizabethan magician Dr. John Dee—we will return to these further on—and found himself speaking with other angels, rather as Emanuel Swedenborg had more than a
century earlier. There was a battle between angels to prevent the squaring of the circle, he was told. He had a vision of Christ and of the Abyss of Water and of Chaos and Death (Crowley’s uppercase). These are early accounts of the kind of visionary experience that occupied Crowley a decade later and were recounted in his book
The Vision and the Voice
.

Yet other thoughts came to him. It was time, he thought, to receive his next initiation. He was supposed to be preparing to receive his Holy Guardian Angel, and focusing on Abramelin’s magic, but Crowley, as usual, was distracted. From the shores of Loch Ness he descended on London and the mediocrities making up the Golden Dawn. Crowley believed he was due to be advanced to the grade of Adeptus Minor 5
⁰
= 6
but his brethren disagreed. They were not happy with the reports of the goings-on at Chancery Lane or with Crowley’s sexual conduct, and his performance as Count Svareff didn’t help. That the Trades Protection Association had blacklisted Crowley for bad debts was also not a plus.
²²
For Yeats, Crowley was a “quite unspeakable person,” and as far as he was concerned, the Golden Dawn was not intended to be a “reformatory.”
²³
Even Julian Baker, the man who brought Crowley in, considered him “a man without principles.” Israel Regardie suggests that Yeats and Co. were shocked by Crowley’s drinking, womanizing, and drug taking, but by this time Yeats himself had experimented with hashish and mescaline, in advance of Crowley, and was no prude; Yeats enjoyed both drugs but found hashish preferable for astral traveling.
²⁴
They knew of the Laura Grahame affair, and even if that did not really involve theft, there was something about Crowley that rubbed his fellow magicians the wrong way. The portal was closed to him.