Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (20 page)

Reuss resigned from his chieftainship of the O.T.O. in 1922, verbally nominating Crowley as his successor—up to now, it must be remembered, Crowley had only been the head of the
Mysteria Mystica
Maxima
, the English branch of the O.T.O. The new dignity did not become effective until 1924/5 when, after a series of conferences and discussions, the German O.T.O. lodges accepted Crowley as Outer Head of the Order; presumably the
Inner
Head of the Order was some discarnate being. Before long, however, some of the German lodges revolted against their new chief; his
Book of the Law
, usually known as
Liber Legis
, had been translated into German and its contents had shocked many of the German initiates. One of them complained that “too late have I been acquainted with the contents of
Liber Legis
, a book branded with a threefold
KEOU
… to my horror I got a real glimpse of the future reconstruction, as planned by the A (strum) A(rgentinum) (
one of Crowley’s magical orders
), of a primitive world order which suggests the blackest days of Atlantis…” Even Frater Recnartus, most prominent of the initiates who had been responsible for Crowley’s elevation, regarded it as a product of demoniac possession.

Some lodges rejected Crowley and carried on their work independently of him, while others more or less accepted him; these latter worked under Recnartus who, as a result of some mysterious spiritual illumination, had now come to accept
Liber Legis
as the gospel of the coming Age of Aquarius.

After Mussolini’s expulsion of Crowley from Italy in 1923 there were no more spectacular
opera
, such as that involving Leah and the goat, but the practice of sexual magic was continued unabated. Nevertheless, the homosexual magical techniques of the XI° O.T.O. became largely abandoned by their creator—while those young men who had gone out to study magic under Crowley at the Abbey of Thelema had usually become involved in homosexual relationships with their tutor, this was not the case with their successors of the late ’twenties and early ’thirties; such occultists as Fratres W.J. and O. were never participants in eleventh degree rites.

Crowley died in 1947, to all appearances a failure—his last words were “I am perplexed”. His sexual magic is the aspect of his teaching which has become most notorious and yet, paradoxically enough, it is probably the least important component part of the philosophy of Crowleyanity. There is no doubt that in many of his contributions to the
Equinox
, and in such books as
Liber Aleph
and
Eight Lectures on Yoga
, Crowley made a real contribution to the literature of occultism. For this he would be remembered, even if he had never come into contact with Theodor Reuss and the O.T.O.

¹
Ambrosii Magi Hortus Rosarum
was written in 1902 but not published until 1906 when it was included in Volume II of Crowley’s Collected
Works
. The marginal notes which gave such offence to the High Court were in Latin and read;
P
ater
I
ubet
S
cientiam
S
cribe,
C
ulpa
U
rbium
N
ota
T
errae,
F
emina
R
apta
I
nspirat
G
audium,
Adest
R
osa
S
ecreta
E
ros, and
Q
uid
U
mbratur
I
n
M
ari.

²
Or so Crowley said. The curious thing is, however, that the
Book of Lies
was not published until 1913, almost a year after Reuss had made his visit. Either there had been a slip in time and Reuss and Crowley were a year in advance of everyone else (as Crowley seems to imply in his
Confessions
) or, rather more likely, to say the least, it was some other passage in Crowley’s writings that Reuss felt betrayed the sexual secrets of the IX°. A third possibility is that the title page of the
Book of Lies
gave a false date of publication and that it was in reality published in 1912. There is some evidence that this may have been the case, for at the back of the book was an advertisement for Crowley’s other books (charmingly headed “The Excreta of Mr. Aleister Crowley”) and the only number of Crowley’s magazine
The Equinox
advertised was No. VII, published in March 1912. If the
Book of Lies
had been published in 1913 one would have expected the advertised issue of
The Equinox
to have been either Number IX or Number X.

³
Crowley himself said that the ritual was found in the papers of Adam Weis-haupt, the eighteenth-century founder of the sect of the Illuminati, but internal evidence shows this to be quite impossible. I have seen a copy in the hand of Victor B. Neuburg, the poet who, many years after he had broken with Crowley, discovered Dylan Thomas. It may be that Neuburg wrote the ritual, but I think it probable that Crowley himself had at least some hand in its composition.

⁴
A short prose poem in three short chapters which Crowley had received in 1904, allegedly by direct voice communication from a spirit called Aiwass.
Liber Legis
purports to give an initiated interpretation of the inauguration of what astrologers and hippies call the “Age of Aquarius” and Crowley called “the Acon of Horus”.

⁵
The God Mentu is usually shown with his left hand resting between his thighs, the fingers clenched and the thumb extended—the significance is clearly sexual.

⁶
For some brief description of these Enochian
Aires
see
Astral Projection, Magic and Alchemy
by S. L. MacGregor Mathers (Neville Spearman, 1971). The results of Crowley’s Enochian experiments were published as a supplement to the
Equinox
and, with many additional notes and comments, as
The Vision and the Voice
(California, Thelema Publishing Co. 1952).

⁷
The thirteenth working was also notable for the fact that during it Crowley spontaneously danced, or, as the record rather pompously expressed it, he “became inspired in a Terpsichorean manner”.

⁸
After 1918 Crowley’s sex-magic diary was amalgamated with his ordinary Magical Record.

The German section of the O.T.O. led by Frater Recnartus—rudely referred to by his opponents as “the old fox”—was known as
Fraternitatis Saturni
, the Brotherhood of Saturn, or, alternatively, as Saturn-Gnosis.

Like Aleister Crowley, their English Chief, the members of Saturn-Gnosis combined their sexual magic with the use of drugs; unlike him, who had described professional astrologers as being ignorant of all subjects (including their own) and had stated that he believed that there was less than one per cent of truth in the doctrines of astrology, they attached great importance to “the science of the stars”. These astrological preoccupations were not, perhaps, altogether surprising, for the fifteen year life-span of the Weimar Republic coincided with the astonishing German revival of late antique astrology and several of the pre-Hitler German astrologers took a strong interest in the less usual aspects of sexuality. In 1931, for example, Christian Meier-Parm wrote an article for
Sterne und Mensch
entitled “The Horoscopes of Thirty Five Girls in Brothels” whilst some three years earlier Dr. Karl-Guenther Heimsoth, an old
Freikorps
fighter, had published his
Charakter Konstellation
, a book devoted entirely to the horoscopes of homosexuals.
¹
Few, however, of these astrologers could have carried their
beliefs to the extent of varying their coital positions with the positions of the planets in the Zodiac—a practice earnestly advocated by the leadership of Saturn-Gnosis. I feel sure that the sex lives of these German magicians must have been difficult in the extreme, and that any tendencies they may have had to promiscuity were checked by the necessity of looking up the planetary positions in an ephemeris before retiring to bed! The instructions for the practice of this astrological sex-magic were given in a document entitled
Die astrologischen Aspekt-Zeichen als Geheim
—
Symbolik für Coitus
—
Stellungen
, an English translation of which I give in full

SPECIAL REPRINT NUMBER TWO
Private reprint for the Fraternity of the Lodge
Fraternitatis Saturni
Secret! Secret!

Astrological Aspects as a Secret Symbolism for Coital Positions.

The ancient mystery schools frequently used as part of the initiation rites of their disciples religious practices and ceremonies which, more or less openly, glorified sexual relations between men and women and used these as a basis for their cult.

This secret symbolism and specialised knowledge was, of course, deliberately withheld from the lower grade and the uninitiated.

We still find rudiments of these sexual mysteries in the cult of Mithras, the festival of Bacchus, and in the early Gnosis before the Gnosis was desecrated by Christianity.

It is obvious to anybody schooled in magic that originally all magical ceremonies had a purely cosmic basis because the initiated priesthood used as a foundation for their cults the planetary prime oscillations of certain aspects in their influence on the psyche and physical organs of men.

As the sexual act brings about the release of the tension of the mutually negative and positive forces of the partners (above all if the act is executed as a consciously magical act) the knowledgeable initiated individual will naturally be able to create favourable conditions for the practical application of the teaching and thus achieve total harmonisation and peak polarisation of the senses.

The fertilisation of the woman is not the aim of such sexual acts as these, for they are of a purely religious nature or are used to create
so-called psychogones which are easily aroused by such sexual intoxication. Thus the position of the body becomes an important part of this religio-magical practice.

7. Leah Hirsig—Crowley’s “Scarlet Woman” sitting beside Crowley’s portrait of her as “a dead soul”.

8. Erotic painting in the
Chamber of Nightmares
at the Abbey of Thelema, Sicily—uncovered by leading underground film-maker Kenneth Anger.

Gestures, movements, body rhythms, and posture are not only important in ritual dances, but are also structurally important factors in all magical ceremonies where they set into vibration or rest the appropriate Chakra.
²
Therefore it is quite understandable that certain positions during intercourse are an important prerequisite for the achievement of certain magical aims.

It is the teaching of astrology, founded on magic, that the squares
³
between the planets especially important in the sexual sphere (i.e. Venus, Mars, Neptune and the Moon) are particularly vital and advantageous. All these squares are of a purely daemonic character and are known to be the gateways to the psyche of Man; this is particularly so if they are already present in the basic horoscope of the individual in question. A person experienced in magic can therefore use with success and without difficulty important aspects whether they be formed by transits of positions in the natal horoscope or actually present in the Zodiac at the time of copulation.
⁴