Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (18 page)

⁴
The Socialist League was later captured by an anarchist faction, after which event it was regarded with loathing by all orthodox Marxists. In its early years, however, it was almost completely Marxist, with Engels indulging in a good deal of behind-the-scenes string pulling. William Morris was one of the League’s founders, and although he is today generally regarded as a libertarian (on strength of
News from Nowhere)
at the time he described himself as being “with Marx
contra mundum”
.

⁵
He also enjoyed a brief but successful career as a war-correspondent.

In April 1911 George Cecil Jones, an industrial chemist of Basingstoke, sued a certain de Wend Fenton for libel. Fenton, who was later to be fined for sending indecent articles through the mails, had published an article in his paper,
The Looking Glass
, in which it was alleged that Jones had a sodomitical relationship with Aleister Crowley the poet and magician.

Neither plaintiff nor defendant called Crowley as a witness, for while Jones thought that Crowley might behave in such an outrageous way in the witness-box that the jury’s sympathy would be alienated, Fenton feared that his own unsuccessful attempt at blackmailing Crowley, which he had made a few months earlier, would be exposed. Nevertheless the action turned into what was, to all intents and purposes, a trial of the morals of Aleister Crowley. The Judge and jury seem to have decided that these were thoroughly reprehensible—they were particularly shocked by the fact that the initial letters of certain marginal notes in Crowley’s
Ambrosii Magi Hortus Rosarum
formed improper words.
¹

Amongst those who gave evidence of Crowley’s supposedly disgraceful morals and behaviour was S. L. MacGregor Mathers, the Chief of an occult organisation called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In the course of his examination by Counsel Mathers claimed,
almost casually, that he was the head of the legendary Rosicrucian Order and that Crowley was a black magician who had stolen some of his secrets. Almost every occult crank and lunatic in Europe seems to have been infuriated by this statement, for each of them sincerely believed that he, and he alone, was the genuine head of the Rosicrucians. As Crowley was obviously Mathers’ enemy, all their sympathies were with the former, and from all over the world came charters and letters conferring mysterious esoteric dignities upon him. Crowley remarked that if he had worn all the medals and badges which had been awarded to him their weight would have prevented him from walking! Crowley also had to suffer visits from some of these supposed Rosi-crucians. One of them was Theodor Reuss, and at his invitation Crowley joined the O.T.O.—he was never one to refuse a dignity, however trivial he thought it—although at first he did not realise that the organisation was anything more than yet another masonic society.

In 1912 Reuss revisited Crowley and accused him of revealing the innermost secret of the IX° of the O.T.O. in one of his published works. Crowley was astonished; he pointed out to Reuss that he wasn’t even a member of the IX° of the O.T.O. and so was hardly likely to be in a position to reveal its secrets. Silently Reuss produced a copy of Crowley’s
Book of Lies
²
and opened it at page 46, the
Ritual of the Star Sapphire
, which begins “Let the Adept be armed with his
Magick Rood
and provided with his Mystic Rose” and clearly has a sexual import. Crowley was thunderstruck; in a flash the sexual magic of the O.T.O. was understood by him. For hours the two Adepts talked. It was agreed that Crowley should become the head of a new order to be called the
Mysteria Mystica Maxima
, an English subsidiary of the O.T.O.

Crowley subsequently visited Berlin, where he was given copies of all the O.T.O. instructional manuscripts, had the impressive title of
King of Ireland, Iona and all the Britains within the Sanctuary of the Gnosis
conferred upon him, and took the name Baphomet as his new magical motto.

After his return to England Crowley made a few desultory experiments with the techniques of the IX° and issued a Manifesto which not only assured would-be members of the O.T.O. that they would “become partakers of the current of Universal Life in Liberty, Beauty, Harmony and Love which flames within the heart of the O.T.O.” but promised them that they would be given “practical assistance in life … so that even if originally poor, they become well able to afford the comparatively high fees of the VII°, VIII° and IX°”. At about the same time either Crowley or one of his disciples produced a verse-ritual
³
published in mutilated form in
Equinox
X, designed to be used as a prelude to the sexual intercourse of the IX°. As this ritual contains some points of interest I reproduce it below—its first printing in unexpurgated form:

THE SUPREME RITUAL

Let a feast be made by the Officers of the Temple. This Temple, into which they then retire, may be any convenient place. An altar is necessary; also a vessel of wine; otherwise as may be appointed by them: e.g. the robes, etc. as said in
Liber Legis
.
¹
The Officers are two in number and they seek Nuit and Hadit through the vagina and the penis. To conceal themselves, they are disguised as Isis and Osiris.

(
The officers meet and clasp hands above the altar. Any preliminary operations, such as opening, banishing, etc., are now done by O., who returns, and they again greet, but as initiates
.)

O. and I. (
face to face
).

I.   What is the hour?

O. When time hath no power.

I.   What is the place?

O. At the limits of space.

I.   What God do we wake?

O. The Lord of the Snake!

I.   With what do we serve?

O. Brain, muscle and nerve.

I.   The shrine in the gloom?

(
She gives the Sign of a Babe of the Abyss, which O. destroys by the Sign of Mentu the God
.
⁵
)

O. Is the Mouth of Thy Womb!

I.   And the Priest in the shrine?

O. Is this Monster of Mine!

(
O. repeats Sign of Mentu and I. gives Sign of Baphomet
.)

I.   And the wonder above?

O.The Quintessence of love.

I.   There are Sacraments?

O.                            Nine.

 There are music and wine

 And the delicate dance—

I.   To accomplish?

O.                      The trance.

I.   And are these three enough?

O. They are servants of Love.

I.   And the Sacrifice?

O.                      I

I.   And the priestess?

O.                   Is thou.

 I am willing to die

 At thy hands—even now.

I.   Worship me first!

(
O. seats I. upon the Altar
.)

O. Mistress I thirst.

(
I. gives wine. They both drink
.)

I.   My mouth is on fire

 To my Lord’s desire.

(
They exchange the holy greeting by a kiss
.)

O. I kneel at thy feet

 And the honey is sweet.

(
I. plays music while O. worships in silence
.)

I.   Exhausted, I sink.

O. I am dead, on the brink.

I.   Let us dance!

O.                       Let us dance!

O. and I. The Lord gives us power

            To be lost in the trance

             For an hour—for an hour!

(
They dance together. A pause of perfect stillness and silence follows; until I., of her own accord, advances and places O. upon the altar
.)

I.   Exhaust me!

O.          Nay, drink!

I.   Ere I sink!

O.          I shall sink.

I.   Drink wine! Oh, drink wine!

O. I am thine!

I.             I am thine!

(
They drink and greet as before
.)

O. Art thou armed?

I.          With a knife.

(
I. draws the dagger from her hair
.)

O. Love is better than life.

(
I. cuts a I, or if possible, the Sigil of NOX on O.’s breast
.)

I.   Let us dance!

O. (
Giving wine
) To the trance!

(
They drink then dance
.)

I.   Back to the throne!

(
O. returns and takes seat thereon
.)

O. I adore thee alone!

(
I. does so, plays music if so inclined, and continues as necessity or inclination may dictate
.)

I.   It is ended, the play:

 I am ready to slay

 Anoint me!

O.                I rise

 To the fire of thine eyes

 I anoint thee, thy priest,

 Babalon—and the Beast!

 And I ask of thee now:

 Who art Thou?

I.   Omari Tessala marax etc.

(
The ritual is now in silence accomplished
.)

IX° (
i.e. Ritual Sexual Intercourse
)
CLOSING

O. Mouth to mouth and heart to heart!

I.   For the moment we must part.

O. Time and space renew the illusion.

I.   Love is swallowed in confusion.

O. Love sustains as eminent

 Till the hour of Sacrament.

I.   I love you, and you love me.

O. Now and ever may it be!

O. and I. Hand in hand is heart to heart.

                 Love be with us, though we part.

(
They greet, as before, and depart
.)

Crowley also attempted, in an essay entitled
Energized Enthusiasm
, to give some sort of
rationale
for the use of sex-magic, a task that had been shirked by the German leaders of the O.T.O. He started from two basic assumptions:

(a) That any form of sexual activity was good in itself; he wrote that he agreed with “the Head Master of Eton that pederastic passions among schoolboys do no harm; further, I think them the only redeeming feature of sexual life at public schools”.

(b) That there was some close connection between sexuality and genius. He wrote that “the divine consciousness which is reflected and refracted in the works of Genius feeds upon a certain secretion … analogous to semen, but not identical with it”.

Having decided that genius had a connection with sexuality, particularly male sexuality (Crowley claimed that all women of genius had at least an element of hermaphroditism in their physical makeup) he went
on to ask how that genius could be, firstly, built up and, secondly, released—or, as he himself put it, “how can the Leyden jar of genius be discharged?” His answer was simple enough; by the invocation of “Bacchus, Aphrodite and Apollo”—in other words, wine, women and song combined into one ritual.

The invocation of Bacchus was simple enough, for wine was easily available and its only disadvantage was the possible intoxication of some of the participants in the invocation; Crowley suggested that the way to avoid this was to have the “bowl of libation” borne by an initiate who would pass by all who showed the least sign of drunkenness. Crowley was undecided as to whether wine should be replaced altogether by what he called “the elixir introduced by me to Europe”. This “elixir”, which he probably discovered on a visit to Mexico, was an infusion of mescal buttons and other herbs in fruit juices and alcohol —he had administered it to the audience at his
Rites of Eleusis
, celebrated at the Caxton Hall in 1910, and one of those who then partook of it described it as tasting “like rotten apples”.

The invocation of Apollo (i.e. music) was more complex, for so few musical instruments were suitable for the purpose. Crowley came down in favour of the organ and the violin (he rejected the harmonium as “horrible”, probably because he associated it with the ultra-Protestant conventicles of his youth) but considered the tom-tom to be ideal, particularly when accompanied by sacred dancing and the rhythmic chanting of a mantra. Even this last-mentioned instrument had its disadvantages, for Crowley’s friend Commander Marston R.N. had carried out some “classical and conclusive” experiments on the effects of the tom-tom on the psychology of the married Englishwoman and found that it created a vague unrest, gradually assuming a sexual form and culminating in “shameless masturbation or indecent advances”. Or so Commander Marston R.N. claimed; but he seems to have been a peculiar individual, even for the Royal Navy of Edwardian England, and, at his Dorset home in May 1910, he took part in Crowley’s invocation of the god Mars (the god supposedly appeared and prophesied not only the Balkan war of 1912 but the war of 1914–18).