Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (19 page)

Most difficult of all was the problem of achieving sexual excitement, “invoking Aphrodite”, without descending into lasciviousness … Crowley’s solution to this problem was never given in its entirety, for after posing the question he broke off his essay (presumably because there were very strict limits on what one could publicly say in the
London of King Edward VII) and concluded with an imaginative description of the sort of sexo-magical rite he had in mind. This description, naturally enough, was couched in extremely elusive prose; “she then laid him down upon the cross”, he wrote, “and took her own appointed place. I was lost to everything.”

Crowley began his first serious experiments in sexual magic on the very last day of 1913. These operations were not the normal heterosexual magic of the ninth degree of the O.T.O., they were homosexual magic of Crowley’s own devising. His partner in these rituals was his disciple
Frater Lampada Tradam
, known in the world of men as Victor Neuburg, who played the male part—Crowley was always strongly feminine in his attitude towards other men. It was the fact that “a casual act of sex” with Neuburg had “produced a great wonder” that had first aroused Crowley’s interest in homosexuality as a means of obtaining magical power. This “casual incident” had taken place during a
Great Magical Retirement
in the North African desert when Crowley was engaged, using his own topaz shew-stone, in a clairvoyant investigation of the thirty Enochian
Aires
from
TEX
to
LIL;
⁶
the homosexual event had enabled him to enter an
Aire
which had previously closed its doors against him.

The record of this series of homosexual magical rites, usually referred to by Crowley and his followers as
The Paris Working
, is contained in two manuscripts. The first is entitled

The
Book of the High Magick Art
that was worked by
Frater O.S.V. 6=5 (
i.e. Crowley
)
and Frater L.T. 2=9 (
i.e
.
Neuburg
)

and the second is called the

Esoteric Record of the
Working
of January 1914
era vulgari

I must here express my gratitude to Gerald Yorke who gave me access to these manuscripts in 1966 and 1967.

Crowley began his work by, as he put it, “receiving the Sacrament from a certain priest A.B.”—which in this connection means having sex with him—and painting a pentacle (a symbolic design) of Mercury, one of the two gods whom it was intended to invoke, the other being Jupiter. The exact identity of A.B. is uncertain, but he was very probably Walter Duranty, the foreign correspondent of the
New York Times
who died in 1957. He remained friendly with Crowley until the latter’s death in 1947 and he certainly had a homosexual relationship with him in the early months of 1914. The “taking of the Sacrament” was over in a mere forty minutes—it lasted from 4.55 to 5.35 p.m.— and Crowley spent most of the rest of the evening painting his Mercurial pentacle until 11.30 p.m. when he and Neuberg began the invocation proper.

This commenced with the Golden Dawn
Banishing Ceremony of the Pentagram
, which was
danced
by Neuburg, following which they invoked Thoth-Hermes (Mercury) by Crowley’s Ritual 671, entitled
The Building of the Pyramid
. This latter rite, which involved Crowley scourging Neuburg on the buttocks and cutting a cross on his chest, was concluded by midnight and the sexual act was proceeded with; simultaneously the two magicians chanted an invocation of Hermes composed by Duranty:

Jungitur in vati vates: rex inclyte rhabdou

Hermes tu venias, verba nefanda ferens.

(
Magician is joined with magician: Hermes
,

King of the Rod, appear, bringing the ineffable word
)

The invocation was only partly successful; Neuburg, whose function in the rite was a mediumistic one, was possessed by the god and Crowley “astrally” saw the room as filled with caducei of Mercury, the snakes alive and moving, but Neuburg was unable to attain orgasm— either because, as Crowley himself affirmed, Mercury was in a prankish mood or, more probably, because Neuburg did not find Crowley sufficiently sexually stimulating—and consequently Mercury (i.e. the possessed Neuburg) could not be asked the many questions prepared for him.

The second working, which began the following evening at 11.20
p.m. and had been preceded by Crowley manufacturing from yellow wax an image of Mercury in the form of an erect penis, was much more successful. The sexual act was fully accomplished and Mercury gave instructions as to how future invocations could be made more effective; for the rite of Mercury they were to remove the clock from the room, “use a gold pentagram, placing the same in a prominent position; drink yellow wine and eat fish before the ceremony”, while for that of Jupiter they were to trample violets with their bare feet, Crowley was to wear a crown and Neuburg a scarlet robe.

The third working commenced at midnight on January 3rd and lasted until 2.15 a.m. Mercury made a very long speech on the relationship between himself and semen, stating that:

“Every drop of semen which Hermes sheds is a world. The technical term for this semen is
KRATOS
… People upon the worlds are like maggots upon an apple, all forms of life bred by the worlds are in the nature of parasites. Pure worlds are flaming globes, each a conscious being …

“… Ma is the name of the god who seduced the Phallus away from the Yoni; hence the physical universe. All worlds are excreta, they represent wasted semen. Therefore all is blasphemy. This explains why man made God in his own image.”

Mercury went on to suggest that he should be invoked on the morrow, not ritually, but by geomancy—a form of divination involving the element of earth—and that on the day following the geomantic operation (and for the three succeeding nights) Jupiter should be sexually invoked. Mercury, who seems to have liked his worshippers to enjoy a good meal, then emphasised the importance of having banquets, said that he wanted Crowley and Neuburg “to overcome shame generally” and suggested a method by which this could be done. Details of the exact nature of this suggested method are missing from the record, but from certain marginal notes it is fairly clear (a) that it was suggested to Crowley that he should take part in an exhibition of buggery in front of some of his friends, (b) that this was subsequently done at the house of his mistress Jane Cheiron, his partner in the act being Walter Duranty.

Mercury finally enjoined that this third working should be closed by another homosexual act, but as Crowley and Neuburg were both
extremely tired this was done “in symbolic form only”. This disobedience seems to have annoyed the god, or so the two believed, for it was to this annoyance that they attributed a heavy cold that Crowley developed on the following day! At midday on January 5th they made good their omission and Neuburg became possessed; he said they were unleashing an enormous magical force, that international complications were to be feared and that “those who adopt this rite will either succeed completely or fail utterly. There is no middle path for it is impossible to escape the ring of Divine Karma created.”

The god then left Neuburg and Crowley became possessed or, as he later decided, obsessed. The obsessing entity informed them that the supreme rite of sexual magic involved the rape, sacrifice and dissection into nine pieces of a young girl; the pieces were to be offered as sacrifices to the immortal gods—the head to Juno, the right shoulder to Jupiter the left to Saturn, the right buttock to Mars the left to Venus, the arms to Priapus and the legs to Pan. In fairness to Crowley and Neuburg it must be emphasised that both later decided that the obsessing entity’s instructions smacked of Black Magic and should be disregarded.

Later in the same day the fourth working was carried out. This time it was Jupiter who was invoked; on this occasion Crowley took the male part, almost certainly because Neuburg had been sexually exhausted by the “sacrifice” to Mercury that had been made earlier in the day.

It would be exacting too much of my readers to impose upon them the details of the twenty further homosexual rites that were carried out before the
Paris Working
was brought to an end on February 12th. The records of the eleventh, and thirteenth workings, however, contain several points of considerable interest. In the former, which took place upon January 21st, Neuburg obtained from Jupiter a message (expressed in the Enochian magical language) informing him that the old gods wanted to regain their ancient dominion over the earth and had chosen him and Crowley as “fiery arrows” to be shot against the “slave gods”, while at the conclusion of the latter, which took place five days after the eleventh working, both magicians “remembered” a Cretan incarnation in which they had known one another. Crowley had been a Temple dancer named Aia; Neuburg had been Mardocles, who, as a candidate for initiation, had been subjected to the ordeal of watching a seductive dance by Aia—he was instructed to either rape the girl or to
remain cool and emotionally unmoved. If he failed to do either he was supposed to be castrated by an instrument resembling a giant candle-snuffer! Mardocles/Neuburg remembered that he had been aroused by Crowley/Aia but, out of tenderness, had failed to violate her. As he was a favourite of the High Priest he had escaped the usual penalty but he and Aia had been expelled from the temple and subsequently sold as slaves to a household where their task was to “amuse the family by various copulations”.

The two magicians considered the
Paris Working
to have been successful and certainly they obtained the funds which had been one of their supplementary requirements of the gods; in Neuburg’s case the invocation of Jupiter seems to have been almost too successful, for, according to a note upon the manuscript, he “became Jupiter the bestower, and many unworthy folk became his guests”.
⁷

In the autumn of 1914 Crowley commenced the serious practice of the heterosexual magic of the ninth degree of the O.T.O. Most of his early experiments were hampered by the after-effects of a severe attack of phlebitis but, assisted by his mistress Leila Waddell (who, on one occasion, physically helped her lover to achieve sexual intercourse with a chorus girl whom he had long hankered after), he persisted in the work and over a period of four years recorded his sexo-magical successes and failures in the three volumes of
Rex de Arte Regia
.
⁸
These tell of homo-, auto- and heterosexual magical operations; the first mentioned often took place, dimly illuminated by flaring gas-lamp
s
, in obscure Turkish Bath establishments with Crowley performing fellatio on fellow-customers (when recording these the diaries usually contain Greek words meaning
in the mouth of the King
). The heterosexual magical
opera
(Crowley always used the Latin word
opus
, work, to indicate a sexo-magical rite) sometimes included more than two participants; a particularly curious series of entries involved Crowley, two women and a negro named Walter.

The most intense period of Crowley’s practice of O.T.O. sexual magic coincided with the three years or so (1920–3) of the life of his Abbey of Thelema, situated at a farmhouse near Cefalu, in Sicily. In
Leah Hirsig, a New York singing teacher who had become his mistress, he had found the ideal partner—in one diary entry he referred to her vagina as “the Hirsig patent vacuum-pump”—and together the two performed rites of a sort that most people thought had been dead for two thousand years. Thus, in the summer of 1921, a he-goat (symbolic of Pan, Priapus, and Capricorn) was induced to copulate with the kneeling Leah before having its throat sacrificially cut at the moment of orgasm; this was the largest blood-sacrifice Crowley ever made, his other victims had been confined to a cat (which, with feline cleverness, managed to inflict a nasty scratch on Crowley before meeting its end), a toad, some doves used to invoke the demon Choronzon, and a few sparrows.

During this Sicilian period Crowley also gave due attention to his homosexual leanings; he personified the feminine elements of his personality make up as
Alys Cusack
, a name under which he had written reviews for the
Equinox
, and over his bed at the Abbey of Thelema hung a notice informing the world that
ALYS CUSACK IS -OT AT HOME
—according to his mood the blank before the word –
OT
would be replaced by either an N or an H.

Leah would sometimes assist her lover in his celebration of homosexual
opera;
lying down in bed with Crowley and the other man involved she would manually stimulate the latter before inserting his penis into Crowley’s body. Thus one of Crowley’s diary entries records that:

“after dinner we sent for X_____. Circa 11 p.m. Opus V. X_____ in ano meo. Operation very lengthy. Alostrael (the magical motto of Leah Hirsig) had to masturbate X_____ to effect erection, and her hand introduced his penis into my anus. Orgasm very strong and savage …”

It is worth adding that X_____, who is still alive, affirms that this diary entry was inadequate and incorrect; that, in fact, he (X_____) was under the influence of ether (no aphrodisiac) at the time and that, in any case, he was not sexually excited by Crowley—in his own words, Crowley’s “Circean enchantment didn’t give me a bone-on”.