The urge for intrigue remained, but the pursuit of a diplomatic career ended abruptly in October 1897, when Crowley fell ill. His condition was not life-threatening, but he nonetheless felt himself drawn to consider seriously his own mortality for the first time:
There was no fear of death or of a possible ‘hereafter’; but I was appalled by the idea of the futility of all human endeavor. Suppose, I said to myself, that I make a great success in diplomacy and become ambassador to Paris. There was no good in that—I could not so much as remember the name of the ambassador a hundred years ago.[ … ]
I did not go into a definite trance in this meditation; but a spiritual consciousness was born in me corresponding to that which characterizes the Vision of the Universal Sorrow, as I learnt to call it later on. In Buddhist phraseology, I perceived the First Noble Truth—Sabbe Pi Dukkham—everything is sorrow.
Following upon his renunciation of chess by only a few short months, this October 1897 experience confirmed for Crowley that no worldly career could satisfy his personal longings. The key was to find that which was “immune from the forces of change”—a paradoxical goal when one considers that Crowley would come to define the essence of the art and science of magick as that of “causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”
What course lay open to him? “Spiritual facts” were alone worthy of his attention. As it happened, Crowley had recently encountered just such a “fact.” Nine months earlier, on New Year’s Eve 1897, Crowley was spending his holiday vacation from Cambridge in Stockholm. At midnight, there occurred an upheaval that Crowley only elusively delineates in the Confessions: “I was awakened to the knowledge that I possessed a magical means of becoming conscious of and satisfying a part of my nature which had up to that moment concealed itself from me. It was an experience of horror and pain, combined with a certain ghostly terror, yet at the same time, it was the key to the purest and holiest spiritual ecstasy that exists.” In The Equinox of the Gods, however, Crowley provided a further telling clue when he described himself, on this night, as having been “Admitted to the Military Order of the Temple.” The part of Crowley’s “nature” that had until now been concealed from him was his bisexuality, revealed through his first homoerotic experience.
What Crowley claimed to have experienced here, by way of his sexual awakenings, was the goal of magical invocation—an encounter with an immanent deity. This is confirmed by an admittedly florid and veiled account of this same New Year’s Eve in The Temple of Solomon the King (1909), authored by J. F. C. Fuller but editorially supervised by Crowley. This account does plainly indicate, however, that the Christian view of redemption and grace was still predominant in Crowley’s psyche, for all his claims of having left it behind, in adolescence, with his lost virginity:
Then came the great awakening. Curious to say, it was toward the hour of midnight on the last day of the year when the old slinks away from the new, that he happened to be riding alone, wrapped in the dark cloak of unutterable thoughts.[ … ] Freedom had he sought, but not the freedom that he had gained. Blood seemed to ooze from his eyelids and trickle down, drop by drop, upon the white snow, writing on its pure surface the name of Christ. Great bats flitted by him and vultures whose bald heads were clotted with rotten blood. “Ah! the world, the world … the failure of the world.” And then an amber light surged round him, the fearful tapestry of torturing thought was rent asunder the voices of many angels sang to him. “Master! Master!” he cried, “I have found thee … O silver Christ.…”
Then all was Nothingness … nothing … nothing … nothing, and madly his horse carried him into the night.
Thus he set out on his mystic quest toward that goal which he had seen, and which seemed so near, and yet, as we shall learn, proved to be so far away.
The experience stirred Crowley, but he was rather more bewildered than enlightened. For all that, it would be a mistake to doubt his sincerity. During the following year of 1897—the same year that chess and diplomacy fell by the wayside—there arose in Crowley a passion for esoteric knowledge into the very basis of existence. This passion would never abate. The path had been chosen.
As a young man of means, intellect, and romantic inclinations, Crowley carried on his “mystic quest” with a flourish. His first field of study was alchemy, the rigorously experimental blending of the physical and spiritual realms. Crowley drew sustenance from some of the basic alchemical terms and principles. “Vitriol,” one of the suggested primary materials for creation of the Philosopher’s Stone, was an acronym for this Hermetic clue, Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultam Lapiderm: Visit the Interior of the Earth and by Purifying you will Find the Secret Stone. Further, the Renaissance physician and magus Paracelsus pointed out that the alchemical elements sulfur (fiery, male, soul) and salt (passive, female, body) can form a transcendent union with “philosophical mercury” (flux, bisexual, spirit). Reconciling these three elements led one to the Philosopher’s Stone, the medicine of souls. All this was suggestive for Crowley. There was a possibility of spiritual ascent, even adventure, through active knowledge of the world and oneself.
But alchemy, for Crowley, did not possess the allure of ritual magic. Alchemy was an all too gradual purification. Magic was the direct and empowering contact with the divine. As he wrote in Magick of the systole and diastole of invocation and evocation: “In invocation, the macrocosm floods the consciousness. In evocation, the magician, having become the macrocosm, creates a microcosm.” Evocation by way of traditional magical ceremony—the rituals of the medieval grimoires, or magical textbooks—enabled one to pay “special attention to the desired part of yourself[ … ] It is the potting-out and watering of a particular flower in the garden, and the exposure of it to the sun.”
This special focus on desired qualities within oneself was irresistible to the young Crowley. But the process of evocation invited indulgence of the worst sorts of personal obsession. And for Crowley, release from the thrall of Christian dualism and sin was an obsession par excellence. Small wonder that his first stumbling steps toward magical practice involved a fascination with heresy. Later, in the Confessions, he wrote with arrogant ablomb: “The forces of good were those which had constantly oppressed me. I saw them daily destroying the happiness of my fellow-men. Since, therefore, it was my business to explore the spiritual world, my first step must be to get into personal communication with the devil.” But in a contemporaneous account—a prologue to his first book of verse, Aceldama (1898)—Crowley told of the anguish he felt at this time in pitting his own spiritual explorations against the accepted Christian God. In December 1897, he sought the advice of C. G. Lamb, a demonstrator in the Cambridge engineering department:
It was a windy night, that memorable seventh night of December, when this philosophy was born in me. How the grave old Professor wondered at my ravings! I had called at his house, for he was a valued friend of mine, and I felt strange thoughts and emotions shake within me. Ah! how I raved! I called to him to trample me, he would not. We passed together into the stormy nigh. I was on horseback, how I galloped around him in my phrenzy, till he became the prey of a real physical fear! How I shrieked out I know not what strange words! And the poor good old man tried all he could to calm me; he thought I was mad! The fool! I was in the death struggle with self: God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered—now I have only one doubt left—which of the twain was God? Howbeit, I aspire!
The “death struggle” may have been “with self,” but Crowley staged the struggle in terms of the dramatic dichotomy of God and Satan. Given such protagonists, the potentially pivotal role of ceremonial magic was obvious. A chance recommendation by a Cambridge bookseller led Crowley to a collection of medieval grimoire extracts edited with extensive commentary by A. E. Waite and luridly titled (by its London publisher) The Book of Black Magic and Pacts (1898). Waite was a mystically inclined man of letters and a scholar of esoteric lore against whom Crowley would direc
t—in the decades to come—a persistent and largely unjust stream of critical abuse. But he would never deny that it was Waite who served as his first influential guide into the world of magic. Waite had intimated in his text that there was an organization that had preserved the true rites of initiation—as to which black magic was but a defiled reflection. Crowley promptly wrote to the elder Waite an admiring letter in which he earnestly requested aid in contacting this organization. Waite replied with a missive suggesting that Crowley read The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary by the German Councillor Karl von Eckartshausen (1752–1813). This Crowley proceeded to do at Watsdale Head during Easter vacation in 1898.
The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary was the single most influential text—after the Bible and The Book of the Law—in the whole of Crowley’s life. Eckartshausen presented, in an ornate style, the mystical thesis that there exists an “invisible and interior Church” or “society of the Elect” that exists quite apart from any established church. The text of Cloud is dominated by pious Christian imagery, which only served to further its impact upon Crowley. As he later summarized it: “The incarnation was a mystical or magical operation which took place in every man. Each was himself the Son of God who had assumed a body of flesh and blood in order to perform the work of redemption.”
At the time that Crowley was reading Cloud at Watsdale Head, he was on vacation with the one person with whom, during his years at Cambridge, he had fallen deeply in love. This was Herbert Charles Pollitt (who preferred to go by the first name of Jerome), four years Crowley’s senior, who had already earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Cambridge but remained in residence in the town as a widely admired entertainer. The source of Pollitt’s renown was his performances as a dancer and female impersonator for the university Footlights Dramatic Club, of which Pollitt had served as president in 1896. Female impersonations were a staple of the male-dominated club, and Pollitt was well within Footlights tradition in creating his own female character, the elegant “Diane de Rougy” (modeled after the flamboyant Parisian dancer Liane de Pougy). Amongst Pollitt’s most popular acts was a convincingly sensuous performance of a “Serpentine Dance.” Indeed, The Cambridge A.B.C., a satirical magazine, described Pollitt as an “androgyne troublant … ou troublante gynandre,” charges that Crowley may have been recalling when he stressed, in the Confessions, that Pollitt showed not the “slightest symptoms” of androgyny. But Pollitt’s performance in The Mixture Remixed—a music hall farce—drew raves from a local reviewer who declared that Diane de Rougy, in a dark wig and successive silk outfits of white, black, and silver, danced “in a manner which would make many women green with envy.[ … ] he reminded me forcibly of one of Rosetti’s women brought to life.”
According to Crowley, this stage allure sadly did not carry over to Pollitt’s day-to-day male existence. “Pollitt was rather plain than otherwise. His face was made tragic by the terrible hunger of the eyes and the bitter sadness of the mouth.” Crowley and Pollitt met in the lodgings of the president of the Footlights Club in October 1897. Relations between them soon grew impassioned and consciously exalted. Consider Pollitt’s customary line of farewell at each parting between them: “To the re-seeing I kiss your hands and feet.” But in the Confessions, Crowley cannot speak of their relationship without indignant—and false—denial of its physical erotic component:
The relation between us was that ideal intimacy which the Greeks considered the greatest glory of manhood and the most precious prize of life. It says much for the moral state of England that such ideas are connected in the minds of practically every one with physical passion.[ … ]
To him I was a mind—no more.[ … ]
It was the purest and noblest relation which I had ever had with anybody. I had not imagined the possibility of so divine a development. It was, in a sense, passionate, because it partook of the white heat of creative energy and because its intensity absorbed all other emotions. But for this very reason it was impossible to conceive of it as liable to contamination by any grosser qualities. Indeed, the universe of sense was entirely subordinated to its sanctity.
It is startling—this uneasy, self-righteous protestation by a man who is known to the world as a shameless sensualist. As a matter of societal perception, Crowley was deeply ashamed of his homosexual aspect, as it conflicted with his status as a manly gentleman coming of age. Crowley was willing to be iconoclastic when it came to Christianity, but he felt compelled to take a virulent stance against the effeminate decadence—as perceived by late Victorian society—of homosexuals. The famous libel action that brought down Oscar Wilde took place in 1895—Crowley’s first year at Cambridge—and feelings ran high in the academic milieu as to the justness of Wilde’s imprisonment. The young Crowley, who might have been expected to admire so articulate a rebel, took precisely the opposite approach. In his Mysteries: Lyrical and Dramatic (1898), Crowley included a scathing verse attack—written in December 1897, two months after meeting Pollitt—against a Cambridge homosexual (possibly Pollitt himself) who had championed Wilde’s cause.
As Crowley took care to stress in the Confessions, he was heterosexually active throughout his college days, the bulk of his affairs being brief and unemotional liaisons either with prostitutes or young women who resided in the town. He insisted that forty-eight hours of abstinence were “sufficient to dull the fine edge of my mind.” As a result, he was compelled to devote otherwise valuable time to finding partners: “The stupidity of having had to waste priceless hours in chasing what ought to have been brought to the back door every evening with the milk!” There was more than inconvenience to contend with; in 1897, Crowley contracted a case of syphilis and had to undergo mercurializing treatments. The misogynist bluster in the Confessions underscores just how outraged, during his Cambridge days, Crowley was by his heterosexual relations. They were openly permitted, and yet he could find in them no worth to equal that of Pollitt: “They had no true moral ideals. They were bound up with their necessary preoccupation, which was the function of reproduction.[ … ] Intellectually, of course, they did not exist.”
In January 1898, Crowley took rooms at 14 Trinity Street, in which he and Pollitt spent much time together. The decor, as described by Crowley in a later unpublished short story, “The Sage,” reflected his growing commitment to magic, a commitment that Pollitt could not embrace:
In this room of contradiction there was one corner more curious even than any. Elsewhere the floor was covered with a carpet; rich sombre peacock blue with an uncertain snaky pattern of deep purple; but here was laid a circular Venetian mosaic. Around its edge ran a band of white marble stones, with what was apparently an inscription. The characters were those of an unfamiliar language; they were inlaid in vivid red. Within this band the circle was yellow of a tint suggesting jaundice; the repellent effect was emphasized by the devices, crabbed and crooked, wrought in it of some sickly green eloquent of all unwholesomeness from mal-de-mer and arsenic to carrion in corruption, and even by the formidably severe lines of the great black star of six points in the unicursal drawing of which sensitive spirits might divine an intention of brutal perversity and blasphemous diabolism.
Until his affair with Pollitt, Crowley had consciously avoided the literary coteries of his own generation. But Pollitt offered Crowley an easy entree into the Decadent world, and he took advantage of it. Amongst the personages he met was the Decadent artist par excellence, Aubrey Beardsley, who was to die later that year. At root, however, the Decadents failed to appeal to Crowley; the gist of his complaint against them was similar to that which he leveled against Pollitt: a pessimism that failed to take into account the rich spiritual possibilities of life. As Crowley later wrote:
The intense refinement of its thought and the blazing brilliance of its technique helped me to key myself up to a pitch of artistry entirely beyond my original scope; but I never allowed myself to fall under its dominion. I was determined to triumph, to find my way out on the other side. To me it is a question
of virility.[ … ] No matter to what depths I plumb, I always end with my wings beating steadily upwards toward the sun.
Due in part to Pollitt’s influence, the year 1898 became a watershed for Crowley’s poetic ambitions, which he fostered by publishing himself. The practice of an author himself bearing printing costs and then being distributed by a publisher (who, bearing no financial risk, was generally willing to consign titles regardless of sales potential) did not then bear the “vanity press” stigma that it does today. The publisher whom Crowley chose was another member of Pollitt’s milieu, Leonard Smithers, who is best remembered as the only British publisher to have had the courage to publish works by Oscar Wilde—most notably The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1899)—in the aftermath of Wilde’s trial. Smithers also produced fine editions of late Victorian erotica, and sold Crowley at least one title in this genre. To evade prosecution for pornography, Smithers employed such tactics as the use of blatantly pseudonymous author names and places of publication. Crowley relished the satiric possibilities here, as well as the practical benefits, and wasted little time in employing them himself.
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