Strange Angel (19 page)

Wooden pews faced a black-and-white-checked stage. On an altar swathed in black cloth stood a tablet carved with hieroglyphs, lit by a phalanx of twenty-two candles. A chalice sat beneath it, surrounded by roses. On either side of the altar were two tall obelisks—one black, one white. A black sarcophagus dominated the stage. A gauze curtain hung over its front, hiding its contents from view. A funereal dirge sounded from an organ at the side of the stage. The room, now full, went quiet. A sallow man in a white robe and sandals walked forward carrying a book, holding it in front of him reverentially. Bowing before the altar, he kissed the book three times, opened it, and placed it in front of him. He turned and in a voice of surprising stridency proclaimed: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” From all around Parsons the crowd responded, “Love is the law, love under will.”

An imposingly large woman appeared onstage, clutching a sword in the manner of a Valkyrie. “The Priestess,” someone whispered to Parsons. “The Virgin,” someone else sniggered. Striding towards the sarcophagus, she cut through the covering veil with her sword. Out of it walked a short, bony man, carrying a lance close up against his chest. He wore a red velvet cape and on his head a diadem in the shape of a snake. His voice thin and piercing and marked by a distinct English accent, he began to intone, “I, Priest and King, take thee, Virgin pure without spot.”

 

The attic in which Parsons found himself was nestled under the roof of a large wooden house on Winona Boulevard in a run-down neighborhood of Hollywood. Parsons had been persuaded to drive down from Pasadena by two social acquaintances of his, John Baxter, a gay man who was particularly fond of Jack, and his sister Frances, a lesbian, who had taken a shine to Helen. They were irregular attendees of what they called the Gnostic Mass of the Church of Thelema. It is possible that Parsons' curiosity about the mass was aroused when he learned that it was the creation of an English writer and magician, little known in America, named Aleister Crowley; for by a curious coincidence Parsons was already familiar with Crowley's work. Months prior to his visit to Winona Boulevard, he had called on his friend Robert Rypinski (the owner of the Pasadena used-car lot), and while browsing through his bookshelf, Parsons discovered a book named
Konx Om Pax,
dating from 1907. Quotes from Catullus, Sappho, the Koran, and Dante peppered its opening pages, while the rest of the book was filled with cabbalistic fairy tales, Chinese characters, and strange meandering rants. Written by Crowley, it was a puzzle book, which must have engaged Parsons' literary dilettantism, but it also spoke of a “hidden knowledge,” of mystics and demons, of magic. For Rypinski the book had been little more than a curiosity, but for Parsons it seemed to be a revelation. “I don't know what it [the book] meant,” remembered Rypinski, “but this was like real water to a thirsty man to Jack.”

Since his childhood attempts to conjure up the devil, Parsons had always been attracted to tales of the hidden, magical mysteries that lurked behind the “real” world. He had always been able to picture Avalon and El Dorado amidst the slag heaps and corrugated-iron sheds of the powder companies and imagine “alchemistic doors” opening overhead when most others would have seen a hazy sunset. The copy of
Konx Om Pax
that spoke to Parsons so directly had seemed as perfect a starting point for the study of these hidden magical worlds as Robert Goddard's much lambasted
A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes
had been for his rocket work.

 

Back in the heavy, airless atmosphere of the attic on Winona Boulevard, the ancient plot of ritual continued. The ceremony combined quasi-Masonic gestures with hints of the Catholic mass, but an intense sexual motif made it unique. The priestess stroked the priest's lance and the priest kissed the priestess between the breasts. They made lavishly sensual declarations in the manner of high Victorian aesthetes: “I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or Purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you ... Burn to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels! Drink to me ... I am the blue-lidded daughter of sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky. To me! To me!” The priest handed out goblets of wine and “cakes of light,” thicker and more robust than normal communion wafers, and read out a long and obscure list of “saints.” Fictional characters tripped fast on the heels of authors; gods were paired with men. Dionysus followed Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism. Pan preceded Pythagoras. The Victorian poet Swinburne came fast after Heracles. However, the most approbation was saved for the last name mentioned—that of Sir Aleister Crowley. Finally, the priest announced to the congregation, “The Lord bring you to the accomplishment of your true Wills, the Great Work, the Summum Bonum, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.” Within thirty minutes of starting the mass was over.

The congregation made its way downstairs. “We make the cakes of light with animal blood,” Parsons was told; “they should really be made with menstrual blood.” The air was still charged with sexual tension, and couples began to pair off to different corners of the cavernous house. The Baxters presented Parsons to the three senior members. The woman who acted as the indomitable virgin in the mass introduced herself as Regina Kahl. She was forty-eight years old, an amateur opera singer and a drama teacher at the nearby Los Angeles City College. A few years before, she had gained mild infamy while acting in a production of Aristophanes'
Lysistrata
that had been raided by the Los Angeles Vice Squad. She had spent the night in jail for performing in the ancient Greek play.

Next was Jane Wolfe, sixty-four years old and looking worn and harried. In her youth she had been a silent film actress of some renown, best known for playing Mary Pickford's mother in the 1917 film,
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
She had lived in Sicily with Crowley and smoked opium with him, and she forever looked back on this time with deep nostalgia. Then the gaunt man who had acted as the priest in the ritual approached the group. Away from the attic his stature was diminished somewhat. His headpiece had concealed the fact that he was bald, and now Parsons could see that the robe he wore had been made from a piece of old theater curtain. But behind his large bony nose and strong jaw flickered an indefinable charisma. He introduced himself as Wilfred T. Smith, fifty-three years old and a clerk for the Southern California Gas Company. He was born in Tonbridge, England, where his father had been the sixteen-year-old son of a prominent English family, his mother a maid in the household. The details of his parentage were hushed up, and Smith had lived with his grandmother before being persuaded to travel to Canada once he turned twenty-one, a common fate for social misfits at the time. There he had become familiar with Crowley's teachings, and he had even met the man in person. He could quote Crowley's poetry from memory, and he talked to Parsons with intelligence and interest, offering to lend him some of Crowley's other books. He told Parsons that the mass was held every week if he wanted to attend. Or, he suggested, Parsons might first want to come to one of the secular social events held at the house—the annual Walt Whitman birthday party, for instance.

If it was a community Parsons had been searching for, he had found one. But he was initially hesitant about joining it. From this first meeting in January 1939, Parsons would spend over a year attending sporadically, mulling over the mixed emotions he felt about Smith, towards whom he would later admit he felt both “repulsion and attraction,” and about the group itself. But whatever Parsons' misgivings at returning to this strange new society, it seemed his most likely hope if he was to understand and explore the work and magic of Aleister Crowley.

 

“Explain me the riddle of this man,” wrote one of Aleister Crowley's earliest biographers, and many have similarly struggled to capture the multifarious bizarreness of the man who referred to himself as Baphomet, Frater Perdurabo, The Master Therion, 666, and The Great Beast. A novelist, poet, philosopher, mountaineer, chess master, painter, big game hunter, but above all, magician, Crowley was born in England in 1875, into a wealthy but austere religious family. As a child he was allowed to read only the Bible; it did not convince him. He grew up to rail furiously against both British prudery and the strictures of orthodox religion, proudly positioning himself in direct opposition to God and the established Christian church. To this end he identified himself with the “Great Beast” from the book of Revelation.

Backed by a sizeable inheritance, Crowley set himself the task of becoming an adventurer on both the physical and mental planes. In 1902 he took part in the first attempt to scale K2 in northern Kashmir, then the highest mountain accessible to Europeans in the world. Although he failed to reach the peak, possibly because of his insistence on carrying his traveling library with him, he and his companions climbed to a record altitude of 21,000 feet. His mountaineering career, however, would be ended just a few years later when he led a disastrous attempt on the holy mountain of Kanchenjunga on the Nepal/Sikkim border, the third highest peak in the world. Crowley narrowly escaped being swept to his death in an avalanche, and his name was somewhat blackened when he was accused of ignoring his fellow climbers' cries for help.

As well as mountaineering Crowley devoted himself to painting and literature, writing reams of poems and verse dramas in a high Victorian style—if not with a high Victorian content. G. K. Chesterton praised his early writings, but many others detested or just ignored them. Laced with blasphemy and, at times, shockingly pornographic, his self-published books were regularly impounded by customs. His prose writings were as unconventional as his poetry. He wrote a systematic study of narcotics and their usage in his book
Diary of a Drug Fiend,
and he was one of the earliest western proponents of yoga, on which he wrote his tract
Yoga for Yahoos,
later retitled
Eight Lectures on Yoga.

Crowley was an obsessive self-promoter—even faking his own death to drum up interest in one of his painting exhibitions—and he turned his hand to anything that interested him or shocked others, the two usually being one and the same. He played at theatrical impresario, leading the “Ragged Ragtime Girls,” an all-girl string septet, on a disastrous tour of Russia. On a trip to the United States he declared himself an Irish Nationalist and called for the dissolution of the United Kingdom, and as the First World War raged he turned his hand to writing pro-German propaganda. By the early 1930s he was quasi-employed as a spy for the British Secret Service in Weimar Berlin, although this merely seemed to offer him the opportunity to troll through the city looking for male prostitutes in the company of the writers Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

He became an infamous character in both London and Parisian societies with his shaven skull and piercing eyes. Possessed of a scatological wit and “baulking erudition,” he courted slander and picked fights in public. He was pompous and a snob, laying claim to a nonexistent knighthood and styling himself at various different times as Lord of Boleskine, a Highland laird, Count Vladimir Svareff, a young Russian nobleman, and Prince Chioa Khan, a Persian prince, not to mention the many previous incarnations he also claimed. He delighted in discussing his sexual peccadilloes, an outrageous thing to do at the time, and his overpowering, mesmeric personality often damaged those around him, particularly the women who flitted in and out of his life. Alcoholism and the asylum were not uncommon ends for those who had known him too well. The British tabloids labeled him “The Wickedest Man in the World,” a role that he inhabited with pride. But even the writer Somerset Maugham, who had known Crowley in Paris and taken an immediate dislike to him, could not condemn him absolutely. Maugham described him as “a fake, but not entirely a fake,” and made him the basis of his early novel
The Magician.
Crowley's glimmer of authenticity stemmed from the fact that for all his polymathic and, some might say, psychopathic tendencies, he held firmly to two underlying and quite genuine ambitions: first, his wish to practice what he called
magick,
“the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,” and second, the establishment of his own self-coined religion of “Thelema.”

Mystical societies were hugely popular in late nineteenth century Britain. The net of empire had dragged back not only material plunder from the East but also a vast number of alternative religious practices—Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism. Such works of comparative religion as Sir James George Frazer's
The Golden Bough
had fostered an increasing interest in esoteric thought within middle-class Victorian circles and prompted a resurgence of such secret fraternities as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Crowley joined one of the most influential of these societies—The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—whose members were drawn from all levels of British society. The poet W. B. Yeats was a notable adherent. It was the Golden Dawn's belief that humans were only partway up the ladder of psychical evolution and that, if properly disciplined, the human will was capable of anything it wished—most notably contacting intelligences that existed outside the physical world. To communicate with these beings, members performed rituals intended to alter their consciousness and to allow them to attune their minds, rather like a radio set, to the different worlds surrounding them. The exact details of these rituals were the order's greatest secret. Only by working one's way up the strict hierarchy that governed the order—through a process of study and financial donation—could one attain them. For Crowley, this ascension was as thrilling a challenge as climbing any mountain. With his natural intensity and eager scholarship, he progressed through the ranks as rapidly as the laws governing the order would allow him. Indeed, impatient for results, he began conducting, and bragging about, magical rituals that were far in advance of his actual standing within the magical order. His precociousness and arrogance seemed to have infuriated the other members, who moved to block his rapid ascent. Frustrated, but with an undiminished appetite, Crowley soon found a way in which he could answer to no one but himself.