Aleister Crowley (9 page)

Undeterred, Frater Perdurabo
crossed the Channel and on
January 13, 1900, presented himself to Mathers. Clad in Highland dress, Crowley requested his initiation from the Count of Glenstrae, the leader of the order. Mathers no doubt recognized Crowley’s magical potential, but at that point, the fact that he had been turned away by Yeats and Co. was a singing endorsement.

Mathers was not on good terms with his flock. The pension from Annie Horniman had ended in 1896 after he had quarreled with her and cast her out. Mathers barely maintained himself and Moina on what he received from the British groups—there were by then others in other parts of the country—but they were increasingly unhappy with his long-distance dictatorship. Baker had confided in Crowley that he believed Mathers was behaving badly and that he was weary of his leadership.
²⁵
Mathers had appointed Florence Farr as his representative in London. She did her best but by the time Crowley had appeared, she had had enough. She offered Mathers her resignation and suggested closing down the temple. Mathers was not keen on the idea and refused. He needed Isis-Urania to provide new recruits for the Second Order; without them it would wither. Now it seemed that in order to prevent that from happening, fate had presented a recruit on his doorstep.

Mathers received from Frater Perdurabo the oaths of obedience and secrecy, and it was done. Crowley was initiated and had entered the beauty of Tiphereth. He took the magical name Parzival, the “pure fool” of the Grail legend. He had passed through the portal and was now an Adeptus Minor 5
⁰
= 6
, a member of the second order, whatever the mediocrities in London thought. He quickly discovered that they did not think much. When Crowley arrived at 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith, the Golden Dauns then office, soon after his initiation, and asked for the rituals pertinent to his new grade, the
order’s secretary, a Miss Cracknell, flatly refused. The Isis-Urania Temple did not, she said, recognize his initiation. This was tantamount to saying they no longer recognized Mathers’s authority. Crowley returned to Paris to inform his chief (and seems to have brought Laura Grahame along as some kind of reward for helping Bennett). Mathers was furious, but was also concerned that the renegades might look to regroup with his old colleague Westcott as a leader. After all, Westcott had made contact with the mysterious Fraulein Sprengel and started it all. Mathers retaliated with a thunderbolt. On February 16 he wrote to Florence Farr and told her in no uncertain terms that Westcott had “NEVER been at
any time
either in personal or written communication with the Secret Chiefs of the Order” and that Westcott had “
either himself forged
or
procured to be forged
” the alleged correspondence with Anna Sprengel.
²⁶
Every atom of magical knowledge the order possessed came from him alone. Until then he had kept secret about this for the sake of the order but events forced his hand. No cipher manuscript had been found. No contact had been made. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had, it seems, been built on a lie. It was only through Mathers that any real contact with the Secret Chiefs had been established and it was only through him that the Golden Dawn could have any real existence. For his part Westcott asserted the genuineness of the Sprengel letters.

Crowley did not realize that this made his own initiation doubtful. If there was no Fraulein Sprengel, why should Mathers’s own account of the Secret Chiefs be believed? Such queries escaped him. He granted Mathers the kind of exceptional status he generally reserved for himself. His master—so Mathers had become—could not be judged by “conventional codes and canons.” “Ordinary morality is
only for ordinary people,” and neither Mathers nor his new acolyte were ordinary.
²⁷
It was time for action. Crowley put aside Abramelin once again and offered Mathers his full support. Crowley drew up a plan of attack. This included a test of loyalty and oath of obedience that reads like something out of a Stalinist show trial.
²⁸
Those loyal would be reprimanded and forced to show their allegiance; those not would be lowered in grade or simply cast out. The delight Crowley took at the prospect of some magical skirmish at which he could confront the loathsome mediocrities is evident in the note about it he made in his diary. He addressed himself as “I, Perdurabo, the Temporary Envoy Plenipotentiary of Deo Duce Comite Ferro, & thus the Third from the Secret Chiefs of the Order of the Rose of Ruby and Cross of Gold . . .” Throughout his career Crowley loved adopting grand-sounding but vacuous titles, and one can imagine him gearing up for battle, waving his magic wand in front of his magic mirror, and perfecting an imperturbable stare.

The Battle of Blythe Road quickly descended into farce. Soror Semper Fidelis
proved to have less fidelity than her name, as she agreed to help Crowley in his plan. The idea was to take possession of the Vault of Christian Rosenkreutz—or the replica thereof—that resided on Blythe Road, a seven-sided room used for ritual purposes whose design was based on the tomb of the founder of the Rosicrucians.
²⁹
On April 17, 1900, Crowley and Elaine Simpson descended on 36 Blythe Road; Crowley had earlier engaged a bouncer from a pub in Leicester Square to back him up. He trusted his magic but took no chances. Crowley informed Miss Cracknell that they had come in Mathers’s name to take possession of the vault. Miss Cracknell headed for the nearest post office and sent a telegram to an E. A. Hunter, a member of the Second Order, saying what had happened. When
Hunter arrived he discovered that Crowley had taken possession of the rooms and had installed new locks. For good measure he had also written his name on the roll call of Second Order initiates. (This seems the kind of spiteful behavior reserved for adolescents.) While Hunter and Miss Cracknell confronted the plenipotentiary, Florence Farr turned up, understood the situation, and fetched a policeman. He requested that Crowley leave. Two days later, while Yeats and Hunter remonstrated with the landlord for letting Crowley in the day before, Frater Perdurabo, Third from the Secret Chiefs of the Order etc., appeared in Highland dress, complete with black mask, dagger, plaid, and gold cross, with Elaine at his side. Yeats and Hunter told him to leave. Crowley stood his ground, although he was somewhat anxious that the muscle he had hired in Leicester Square had failed to show. (He finally did once the dust had cleared and explained that he couldn’t find the place.) This struggle of magicians lasted until Yeats persuaded the landlord to get a policeman who again requested that Crowley leave. Yeats then ejected Mathers and Elaine from the Order. As Crowley was not in the Second Order—at least according to Yeats—the excommunication did not apply to him. In the end Crowley tried to settle the matter in court, but lost the case and had to pay costs, a foreshadowing of future legal defeats. The Battle of Blythe Road was over, and so was the Golden Dawn.
³⁰

Crowley returned to Paris and declared his mission a success. The rebel group had been dispersed, the dead wood chopped off. In reality he had made a mess of things but the order had grown moribund and his disruptive appearance at least cleared a space for new developments. Yet by this time Crowley, too, was growing cold on Mathers. In his catastrophic letter to Florence Farr, Mathers had announced that Fraulein Sprengel was indeed not dead but still alive
and working with him in Paris. When Crowley met Mathers, he discovered that his master had been hoodwinked by a common scam. The woman who claimed to be in contact with Anna Sprengel was one Mrs. Horos, who had convinced Mathers of her authenticity by repeating certain secret remarks he had exchanged with Madame Blavatsky years earlier. Mrs. Horos, who also went by the names of Swami Vive Ananda and Marie Louise of the Commune, told Mathers that she had absorbed Blavatsky’s spirit after her death (in 1891), hence her knowledge and also her weight; she was obese, as Blavatsky had been. Mathers told Yeats that Mrs. Horos was “the most powerful medium living,” and it was through Mrs. Horos that Mathers believed he had spoken with Fraulein Sprengel; how this left his revelation that her letters were frauds is unclear.

Mrs. Horos, whose real name was Editha Salomon, was an American adventuress, and she had so convinced Mathers of her genuineness that he allowed her access to some important Golden Dawn rituals. Mrs. Horos and her much younger husband, Frank Dutton Jackson, a defrocked priest, then sailed to South Africa, taking the Golden Dawn material with them. It was at this point that Crowley heard about them from Mathers, who now saw Mrs. Horos as a swindler—like Crowley, he was an inveterate paranoid, accusing practically everyone around him of theft. The Horoses returned to London in 1901 and started their own version of the Golden Dawn, as well as a College of Occult Science. It was there that the trouble started. Along with classes on magnetism, clairvoyance, mediumship, and thaumaturgy, the Horoses also practiced a kind of sex magick well in advance of Crowley. Eventually the Horoses were accused of the kind of sexual offenses that Crowley himself would attract years later, with unsuspecting virgins being ritually deflowered and
other indecorous acts. The police became involved and in the end Mr. Horos was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and Mrs. Horos to seven, for rape and theft, among other offenses. There was some cause for this, but as in the case of Crowley, their real crime was more likely breaching Victorian morality. Nevertheless, the trial brought the real Golden Dawn into disrepute.
³¹

Crowley began to suspect that the Secret Chiefs had abandoned Mathers, too. If that was the case, then he would have to look elsewhere for direction. It was too late to return to Boleskine and restart the Abramelin ritual. Yet again his Holy Guardian Angel would have to wait. In Paris Crowley met two initiates, members of the Order who were Mathers’s guests. They had just returned from Mexico and spoke highly of it. What was the point of sitting quietly in one place, even if that was precisely what Abramelin required? The New World beckoned. In late June 1900, Crowley sailed for New York, on his way south of the border.

THE WORD OF THE AEON

Crowley arrived in New York in early July during a heat wave. His departure from England may have had as much to do with the fact that the police wanted to speak with him about Laura Grahame’s gift as with the debacle on Blythe Road or the glowing reports about Mexico he had heard from Mathers’s guests. He lingered long enough in his hotel room to make disparaging and inaccurate remarks about the Statue of Liberty—in between taking cold baths—and after three sweltering days he boarded a train for Mexico. His first impressions of the country were equally morose. His fastidious tastes were repelled by the food, the poor hotel service, and the unfamiliar liquor. But he was fated to endure to the end and eventually acclimated himself. He took a house in Mexico City overlooking the Alameda, and a woman to tend his needs. Here he discovered that he was, in fact, spiritually at one with Mexico. That the natives’ hearts were set on “bull fighting, cock fighting, gambling and lechery” made him feel right at home.
¹
He met an old man, Don Jesus Medina, a high-ranking Mason who was so impressed by Crowley’s Kabbalistic knowledge that he initiated Crowley to the highest
Masonic degree in practically no time. Although some commentators suggest that Mathers’s guests provided an introduction to this master, there is about as much evidence for the real existence of Crowley’s Don Jesus as there is for Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan and so we must take this encounter with some grains of salt.
²
Crowley also inaugurated his own magical order, the Lamp of the Invisible Light, or L.I.L., the aim of which was to have a temple with an ever-burning flame. Crowley claims that some of the secrets of the L.I.L. came from his previous incarnation as Cagliostro, the eighteenth-century Italian magician.

Crowley practiced his magic dutifully. He developed a method of inducing a trance via a kind of magical dance that produced a peculiar lucidity. He also developed the power of invisibility, something that came in handy in some tight spots on his later adventures and which he also regularly practiced in London’s Cafe Royal, a popular fin de siècle watering hole for writers and artists.
³
The waiters there told a story of Crowley parading around in full magical regalia, seemingly unnoticed until a visitor asked who he was. “Don’t worry,” the waiter replied, “that’s just Mr. Crowley being invisible.”
⁴
Crowley claimed that he reached a point where his image in the mirror would become faint and jittery, like an old film. But the real secret of invisibility is to make people not notice you, which is really the art of misdirection, something all stage magicians need to master. Crowley claimed that he could walk along a crowded street wearing a gold crown and red robe without being noticed. We may laugh at such claims but most of us are familiar with the strange phenomenon of being overlooked when we do not want to attract someone’s attention. This may involve some form of telepathy and Crowley’s invisibility may have been a more focused variant on this.

Crowley’s magical advance hit a bump when he realized that most magical disciplines require a morally pure life—indeed such was the essence of the abandoned Abramelin work. Naturally he disagreed and explained that the true necessity was to develop every aspect of one’s self. In order to accommodate his sexual and magical needs, Crowley took to practicing a kind of willed split personality. He wore a jeweled gold ornament as a sign of his Second Order standing, and Crowley hit on a Jekyll-and-Hyde answer to his dilemma. When he wore the ornament, he would allow himself only the purest thoughts and actions, in accordance with his magical aspirations. When he wasn’t wearing it, he could do whatever he wanted
except
anything to do with magic. This expedient seemed to work well for Crowley but most readers, I think, will find his “mind switching” something of a rationalization. If the aim of personal development is to become “whole”—“individuated,” in Jung’s term—then allowing one side of yourself to countermand the other with good conscience seems a way of avoiding this.
⁵

At one point Crowley reminisced about Susan Strong, the opera singer he had been briefly engaged to, and recalled hearing her sing the part of Venus in Wagner’s
Tannhäuser
. His excitement led him to pick up a Mexican woman who attracted him by the “insatiable intensity of passion that blazed from her evil inscrutable eyes and tortured her worn face into a whirlpool of seductive sin.”
⁶
He spent some time with his tortured seductress in a slum and was so inspired by her lust—which no doubt helped her support herself—that he went back to his house and spent the next sixty-seven hours writing his own version of Wagner’s mythological tale of sacred and profane love, a feat, he tells us, that marked the climax of the first period of his poetic work.

The dry air of Mexico was a positive encouragement for Crowley’s magical work. But that he was succeeding beyond his expectations did not please him. Instead he found that his advance was depressing him. He was getting what he wanted, but this only made him realize that he wanted something else. His anxiety became unbearable and as he had before, he sent out a magical distress signal. A letter from George Cecil Jones, he tells us, gave him the answer he needed, though what exactly that was is unclear. But along with his magical needs, his inability to sit still was irritating him. He needed action, and in January 1901 a more visceral relief arrived in the form of Oscar Eckenstein. The two planned to climb Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhautl, both of which, at 17,000 feet, were higher than the Alps. Eckenstein had no respect for Crowley’s magical work, considering it pure rubbish. Although Crowley usually had no qualms about flexing his magical muscles, in Eckenstein’s presence he became uncharacteristically sheepish and was loath to speak of anything to do with his pursuits for fear that Eckenstein would laugh. But Crowley’s magical distress was too great and at one point he spoke of his confusion. Eckenstein told him that his problem was an inability to control his thoughts and he offered instruction in this. Crowley was so shaken by Eckenstein’s reprimand that he took an oath to master concentration. The kinds of exercises Eckenstein taught Crowley—visualizing objects of increasingly complexity—seem much like the
tattwa
visualizing exercises practiced by the Golden Dawn and could not have appeared too unusual to him.
⁷
It is curious that both Bennett and Eckenstein—the two men Crowley really respected—saw mental discipline, something Crowley desperately needed, as essential.

Eckenstein’s advice must have worked. The two headed to Amecameca, a town at the base of both mountains, and spent three
weeks at a camp 14,000 feet up Iztaccíhautl, eating canned food, drinking champagne, and breaking world records, at least according to Crowley. A comical incident occurred when, on returning to civilization, they were told of the death of Queen Victoria, who had ruled Britannia for sixty-three years. Expecting the Englishmen to be heartbroken, their host was surprised to see Crowley toss his hat into the air and jump for joy. At Colima they attempted to climb the active volcano but backed down when the soles of their boots began to burn. At Popocatépetl they brought along a journalist who had written disparagingly about their climbing ability. Tying him between themselves, they raced to the summit at top speed—Crowley and Eckenstein had already broken the record for uphill pace at great height. Eckenstein went ahead and pulled as Crowley brought up the rear, prodding his breathless companion with his axe. After this Crowley said that they had “achieved all our real objects” but more likely they were simply tired of climbing and a more pressing matter dominated Crowley’s mind: the question of Mathers’s authority and his link to the Secret Chiefs, something, he believed, that Bennett could answer. He and Eckenstein agreed to meet soon to plan an expedition to the Himalayas, where they would tackle Chogo Ri, K2, the second-highest mountain in the world. But for the time being they separated, Eckenstein heading for England and Crowley traveling north to San Francisco, en route to visit Bennett in Ceylon.

In El Paso, Texas, Crowley watched a man have his eyes gouged out over a card game. In San Francisco, he stayed in Chinatown. He liked the Chinese and instantly recognized their superiority to Anglo-Saxons, but San Francisco itself, a “madhouse of frenzied money-making and frenzied pleasure-seeking,” didn’t appeal.
⁸
Early May found Crowley on board the
Nippon Maru
bound for Honolulu. He
headed to Waikiki, where he fell in love with an older American woman who was traveling with her adolescent son.
⁹
Her name was Mary Beaton but Crowley discreetly calls her Alice. Like his Mexican prostitute with evil inscrutable eyes, Mary inspired Crowley and the result was
Alice: An Adultery
, a sonnet sequence, in which Crowley describes their amorous acts. These included sex en route to Japan while Alice’s son was in the same cabin. On the
Nippon Maru
they reached the Land of the Rising Sun and parted. Crowley’s sonnet sequence immortalized their doomed love—she regretfully had to return to her husband—but Crowley seems never to have considered that Alice simply wanted a holiday fling with a younger man. Crowley insults her for luring him away from his single-minded quest and teaching him what women were worth, forgetting that he had already been deflected from his fate several times by his own doing.

Crowley didn’t like Japan or the Japanese, comparing them to the English—they were, after all, two island nations—but ironically, given his later behavior among “natives,” resenting their racial arrogance. This criticism may have been prompted by his being turned away from a monastery near the Kamakura Daitbutsu, one of the huge statues of the Buddha that dot the island. His destiny lay elsewhere, indeed, but the monks may have recognized trouble. The fact that Crowley considered taking vows when he had already traveled across the Pacific en route to seek Bennett’s advice about an all-important question suggests that, once again, Crowley really had no idea what to do with himself. But he gave his wandering some rationale, saying that he was sent here or there by order of the Secret Chiefs, much as Madame Blavatsky had mythologized her earlier journeys, saying they were ordained by her Hidden Masters.

In Hong Kong Frater Perdurabo
met with Soror Semper Fidelis
hoping to receive some magical solace. Since relocating she had turned her fidelity to her husband—she was now Elaine Witkowski—and her magical days were behind her. Crowley was shocked to hear that she had worn her magical robes at a costume ball given by British expats and had won first prize. Disgusted with Elaine’s heresy as well as her reluctance to renew their intimacy, Crowley wandered to Ceylon, which he reached on August 6. In Colombo he found Frater Iehi Aour
tutoring the sons of Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan, the solicitor general of Ceylon, who later became the Shaivite guru Sri Parananda. Ramanathan was also the cousin of the art historian and Traditionalist philosopher Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, whose wife would later have an affair with Crowley. Although Crowley found Ramanathan charming and cultivated—he had written a commentary on Saint Matthew that argues that Jesus was a yogi—he had no love of Hinduism and felt that Bennett could do better. But the real reason for his visit, the all-important question, remained.

And it remained unasked: we never know exactly what Crowley wanted to know. But, at least according to Crowley, it did not remain unanswered. We do know that Crowley’s question revolved around an incident in which Bennett and Mathers argued about the Hindu god Shiva. It is said that if Shiva’s name is repeated often enough, he will open his eye and destroy the universe. Crowley suggests that Mathers took this personally, and that when Bennett began the mantra “Shiva, Shiva, Shiva,” Mathers threatened him with a pistol. Bennett, oblivious to all save his mantra, continued, and Mathers put the pistol to Bennett’s head. One account has Moina Mathers entering the room and saving Bennett’s life; another has Mathers finally cowed by Bennett’s greater faith. It is unclear what this strange but typical tale has to do with Crowley’s magical distress, except that
his remark—“Mathers thus disposed of, to business!”—suggests that it somehow cleared the way for his further magical advancement.

Bennett’s health was suffering and Crowley convinced him to relocate to the more beneficial climes of Kandy. There Crowley rented a bungalow overlooking a lake and for six weeks he again undertook instruction from Bennett, this time in yoga and meditation. Practically everything Crowley knew about yoga came from this time with Bennett. Yoga formed a large part of Crowley’s magical teaching. It makes up a good portion of his first magical handbook,
Book Four
, and his ideas about “higher consciousness” are usually couched in Buddhist or Hindu terms. One of his best works is the
Eight Lectures on Yoga
, a series he gave in London in 1937 and which was published many years later. Crowley’s approach is simple, clear, and unencumbered by jargon. “I propose to invoke the most remote and elusive of all Gods,” he told his audience, “the light of common sense.” “Yoga,” he tells us, “is first of all the union of the subject and the object of consciousness: of the seer with the thing seen.”
¹⁰
As with his magical apprenticeship, Crowley took to his lessons avidly and within a few weeks had reached this union, known as Dhyana. Crowley’s aim in pursuing yoga was not the same as Bennett’s. He did not seek withdrawal from the world but the ability to “produce genius at will”—part of what Crowley called “Scientific Illuminism”—genius being in this sense the liberation of consciousness from mundane cares and a broadening and expansion of its power, an idea he discovered in William James’s classic
The Varieties of Religious Experience
. He recognized that in this sense yoga and magic have a common aim, the attainment of Samadhi, the highest level of Dhyana, being practically identical with the magical “assumption of the god form.”