Strange Angel (20 page)

Crowley married his first wife, Rose Kelly, in 1903. He dubbed her his Scarlet Woman, a term he used for women who acted as his personal spiritual mediums. Rose traveled with him to Cairo in 1904, where Crowley was preparing his latest adventure, an undercover journey to Mecca (which he was forbidden, as a non-Muslim, to enter) in the footsteps of his hero, the scholar, explorer, and Orientalist Sir Richard Burton. Once there, Rose fell into a hashish-induced trance and announced to Crowley that Horus—the falcon-headed god of ancient Egyptian mythology—was waiting for him. Rose told him that he was to go to the temple he had constructed in their Cairo apartment for his magick rituals. Crowley obeyed his wife's commands and, according to his own account, in the temple he heard a man's voice begin to speak from over his shoulder. Crowley wrote down every word the voice said, and by the time it had finished speaking, he had written what he entitled
The Book of the Law.
It was this book that played such a prominent role in the ceremony that Parsons watched in the attic of Winona Boulevard.

The book expounded the religion, or law, of Thelema, after the Greek word for “will.” It took the form of a prose poem in three chapters, announcing the coming of a new age, the Aeon of Horus—the age of the child—which would commence, coincidentally, that very year. Crowley declared himself its prophet—the Logos (word) of the Aeon—and he asserted that his religion was destined to overthrow all established faiths. The central tenet of his book was the doctrine of total self-fulfillment; he expressed this creed with the phrase, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

Ironically, it would be this central creed that would forever hamper greater acceptance of his religion, for the doctrine of Thelema appeared to the press and public alike as little more than a call to debauchery. Throughout his life, Crowley would insist that he never intended it to be read as such. Rather, it was a call to self-awareness, to the discovery and pursuance of the follower's true will. But the phrase's ambiguity seemed somehow representative of Crowley's own personality. In both his lifestyle and writings, he was a mesmerizingly inconstant man. Just as he chafed at society's restrictions, so he subverted his own decrees when it suited his purpose, often to the profound consternation of his disciples, who treated him with something approaching papal infallibility. Indeed, his quicksilver character also helped ward off those followers who thought they could supplant him. Although he would write, “My sword to him that can get it,” Crowley's changeability meant that any attempt on his leadership was doomed to failure. He made the rules and the rules allowed no one to displace him. He was perhaps most inconsistent when it came to sex, abhorring the term “free love” even as he practiced it to its fullest extent. But while many of his biographers have tried to simplify his character—calling him either a shameless debauchee or a misunderstood holy man—most have judged Crowley's belief in the
Book of the Law
as a profound religious text to be sincere, if infuriatingly irregular.

After his fateful vision, the dissemination of Thelema became the “Great Work” of Crowley's life. Upon leaving the Golden Dawn, he began his own secret society called the A∴ A∴, (also known as the Argenteum Astrum or Silver Star) in which he offered individuals personal instruction in the mysteries of magick. He came to realize, however, that if his Law of Thelema was to be spread to a wider audience, he could not rely on a secret society. He needed an open outlet for his teachings, not to mention an inlet for donations. In 1912 he had joined a small quasi-Masonic organization named the Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO, which boasted 500 members spread across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Crowley seized control of the OTO, started a chapter in Britain, and began rewriting its rituals, grafting
The Book of the Law
into the society's texts and adding the formally choreographed Gnostic Mass as its ceremonial centerpiece. One OTO ritual he preserved, however, was the use of sex as an intrinsic component of the working of magick. The OTO's members believed that sexual ecstasy could lift one to a different plane of consciousness, a common concept in Eastern religion. But the sexual act had to be controlled, so that it became a further extension of meditation. Followers would pay Crowley an annual subscription, as well as fees each time they progressed along the ten degrees of attainment. (Perhaps as a means of encouragement, the secrets to sex magick would only be revealed once the ninth degree was attained.) Thus it was through the OTO, and its amalgam of magickal practices, that Crowley began to propound his religion of Thelema across the world.

 

By 1939, the year of Parsons' first attendance at the mass on Winona Boulevard, Crowley was sixty-four years old and no longer the devil of his youth. A life spent exploring the unconscious with the aid of every possible stimulant, sexual practice, and magick ritual had tired his body and his finances. The novelist Anthony Powell remembered meeting Crowley in his latter years. His face was “dull yellow in complexion, the features strangely caught together within the midst of a large elliptical area, like those of a horrible baby, the skin of porous texture, much mottled, perhaps from persistent use of drugs.”

Living in a small flat in London's Jermyn Street, Crowley was cared for by an ever decreasing circle of friends and acquaintances. His diaries from the time record the pains of a body breaking apart at the seams. Dental catastrophes, asthmatic attacks, fainting spells, and insomnia were compounded by fevers, sweating, constipation, and diarrhea. He was by now a heroin addict; the habit helped ease his pains but threw him close to death whenever his daily dose of “tri” did not appear. Despite his infirmities he kept up his libidinous ways, and his charisma, if somewhat diminished, was still affecting to his lady visitors. His diaries speak of hours spent performing cunnilingus, of sleeping with female prostitutes and picking up bus conductresses, interspersed with roars against hateful impotence. “Alice here,” reads one entry; “I had severe Freudian reluctance to do any thing (v. sick after tea) But frigged her for human kindness' sake.” Besides heroin and sex, chess and the cinema appeared to be the greatest pleasures left to him. He writes of watching
A Night to Remember
(a film about the sinking of the Titanic) four times, and describes his reaction to the cartoons screened before the feature films: “Donald Duck's Garden tech-nicolour: infinitely sad!”

His health was not improved by his huge workload. Crowley was still turning out a prodigious amount of poems, plays, Thelemic writings, and trying to raise the money to publish them. His mind was still clear, and his tireless devotion to his Great Work was undiminished. But more and more it seemed as if the world had tired of him. The OTO, five hundred strong at its height, had shrunk to less than fifty members scattered across the globe, and the occasional donations he received were immediately spent on maintaining his grandiose lifestyle, bankrupting him still further. His last significant sally into the spotlight took place in 1934, when he brought libel proceedings against a publisher who had claimed he was a “black magician.” The judge, however, decreed that it was virtually impossible to libel a man of Crowley's reputation. The case bankrupted him.

Despite his best efforts, his notoriety had never translated into attracting members to the OTO. The heyday of the mystical society seemed to have faded. Crowley was an anachronism, a bygone tabloid devil. “No cash, no credit, no news, no tobacco, no friends, no printer, no hope, no bloody nothing,” he lamented to his diary. But there was one hope left—America.

 

If ever there had been a place to begin a religion, it was Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century. The attic chants that Parsons had joined on Winona Boulevard were part of a hubbub, a bedlam of prayer that emanated from the city. If a deity or deities had been listening, they would have been deafened by the white noise. The orange groves had been uprooted and replaced by cheap bungalows, and it was the boosters for religion who now prospered in the sun. A large, displaced populace was particularly responsive to a host of cults and cranks, enticed by both religious promises and the carrot of community. As Crowley wrote to Wilfred Smith at the height of the depression, “The world is drowning—that is exactly why it will clutch at a straw.”

The nineteenth century had seen all manner of new religions rise and fall in the United States. A fascination with what the religious historian Sydney Ahlstrom called “harmonialism”—a belief that spiritual, physical, and even economic well-being flow from a person's connection with metaphysical forces of the cosmos—manifested itself in such new forms of thought as Spiritualism, Christian Science, New Thought, and Theosophy. These radical religions abandoned much traditional Christian doctrine and prospered on a mixture of charismatic founders, complex internal hierarchies, secret doctrines, and elaborate rituals. Like the mystical societies of Victorian Britain, many of these new religions incorporated aspects of Eastern religions. These had been brought to the United States' attention not only by the Japanese and Chinese immigrants who had flocked to the Pacific Coast, but by Hindu missionaries who had appeared at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. While they introduced the American people to such new words as
reincarnation, nirvana,
and
Karma,
the new religions also echoed the creed of self-reliance that had been an article of faith in American religion and culture for almost a century. This “new age in religion” found particularly strong footing in Los Angeles, where an aspi-rational population desperately sought a philosophy that offered the spirit what California had offered the body. Drawn by the promises of instant gratification inherent in the gold and health rushes that had prompted their exodus west, Angelenos expected the same from their religions.

Such a powerful demand was met with alacrity. The Church of Light disseminated its “Religion of the Stars” through classes preaching the use of tarot cards and astrology. The Institute of Mentalphysics, founded by Edwin Dingle, a former student of Tibetan monks and author of
Breathing Your Way to Youth,
offered to teach secret Oriental laws through its correspondence course. Just off Hollywood Boulevard, the lotus-scented Vedanta Society told how to transcend the limitations of self-identity through the study of ancient Hindu scriptures. Authors Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood would later seek instruction in its techniques. Few establishments were as grandiose as that of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), whose Egyptian museum in San Jose took up an entire city block. It stressed the virtues of reason and science while also suggesting that ancient Egyptian wisdom would allow its followers to re-lease the hidden powers inherent in man.

A number of religious groups assimilated the new wonders of science into their teachings. The Superet Light Church, founded in 1925 by the “atoms aura scientist” Josephine C. Trust, taught of good and evil atoms, invisible spectrums and the spiritual significance of favorite colors. Others focused on direct individual improvement in health. The Church of Divine Science preached the gospel of “perfect action and perfect thinking ... perfect breathing and perfect circulation, perfect digestion and perfect generation, perfect voice and perfect speaking.”

There was a multitude of movements to choose from—the “I Am,” Mankind United, the New Thought Alliance, the Christ-Way College of Occult Science, and The Occult Science of Christ Church. Even fundamentalist forms of Christianity, such as that preached by Aimee Semple McPherson's International Church of the Foursquare Gospel at the giant Angelus Temple in Echo Park, seemed to have been warped by the Los Angeles sun. McPherson created a flamboyant show business atmosphere around her evangelical church. She preached sermons over the radio—she was the first woman to be awarded a radio broadcast license in the United States—and enthused the 5,000 strong congregations she regularly attracted with contemporary music, bizarre pageantry—ministers dressed in armor, brandishing swords—and extraordinary entrances, once driving down the aisle of her temple on a motorbike. Her church's message spread across the nation, gaining her some 80,000 members, but its leader proved increasingly unstable and prone to scandal as she suffered a string of nervous breakdowns and unseemly divorces, and eventually faked her own kidnapping. She would die from an overdose of barbiturates in 1944.

Such a high concentration of new and unorthodox religions was not to everyone's taste. Los Angeles “swarmed with swamis, spiritualists, Christian Scientists, crystal-gazers and the allied necromancers,” spat H. L. Mencken when he visited the city.

 

Although Jack Parsons was brought up in an apparently traditional Protestant home, he was no stranger to the alternative religions bubbling around him. Along with thousands of other Angelenos, he had taken a passing interest in one of the most mainstream and highly influential of the new movements—Theosophy. The Theosophical Society was founded by the fraudulent psychic Madame Blavatsky in 1875. Its adherents claimed to be the guardians of ancient wisdom which they had obtained from a secretive brotherhood of “highly evolved adepts and masters” who lived in the Himalayan Mountains. Theosophy was both a philosophy and a religion, preaching the doctrine of reincarnation as well as spiritual evolution. Through the study of its teachings, one could ascend through the astral plane to an understanding of the divine. An obscure fourteen-year-old Indian boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti had been dubbed the movement's new Messiah or “World Teacher,” but he had renounced these claims in 1929 and now lived in Ojai, California, eighty miles north of Los Angeles, where he taught and gave lectures. In the years immediately before he attended the Gnostic Mass, Parsons and Helen traveled up the coast a number of times to hear Krishnamurti talk. But while it seems that Parsons was interested, he was never completely convinced. He would later write of being “nauseated” by Theosophy's talk of the “good and the true.”