Smithers served as the designer and publisher of Crowley’s first two books of poems—Aceldama, and the notorious erotic collection White Stains—both published in 1898. These are the two most important works of Crowley’s prolix Cambridge years. Consider the sheer output Crowley achieved as a young poet—it underscores his ambition here, which survived even after chess and diplomacy had been decisively rejected. His subsequent books of this period were printed by a man recommended to Crowley by Smithers (who went bankrupt in 1899): Charles Thomas Jacobi, manager of the Chiswick Press. These include The Tale of Archais (1898), Songs of the Spirit (1898), The Poem (1898), Mysteries: Lyrical and Dramatic (1898); and Jephthah and Other Mysteries (1899). In general, it may be said that Crowley’s early poetry is rich in ideas—drawing especially upon the Bible and Christian theology, esoteric lore, classical mythology, and philosophy—but woefully short on original imagery and organic musicality. But there were two contexts in which Crowley’s verse could take life: spiritual perplexity and erotic obsession. These two contexts are exemplified by Aceldama and White Stains, respectively. They are each remarkable in terms of psychology, and especially so given the age of their author. For quite different reasons, Crowley published each pseudonymously.
The full title of Crowley’s first book is Aceldama, a Place to Bury Strangers In. A Philosophical Poem. On its title page, the author is indicated only as “a gentleman of the University of Cambridge”—an homage to Shelley, whose The Necessity of Atheism (1811) had been published by the young poet—just before his expulsion from Oxford—as the work of a “Gentleman of the University of Oxford.” Crowley paid for one hundred copies to be printed, two on pure vellum, ten on a kind of paper known as Japanese vellum, and eighty-eight in an “ordinary” edition on handmade paper. Although few copies were sold, and the one review the book received deprecated its morals, Crowley was delighted by the publication. “My scheme from the first,” he would later confide, with respect to the design and issuance of his books, “was to create complexity and rarity.”
Aceldama consists solely of the title poem, which runs some thirty-two stanzas. “Aceldama” means “Bloody Field” in ancient Hebrew and is the name of the field Judas purchased with the pieces of silver earned for betraying Jesus. On that field, the Book of Acts tells us, Judas fell headlong and burst asunder, his entrails pouring out. The “silver Christ” whom Crowley encountered in Stockholm on New Year’s Eve 1897 returns in the penultimate stanza of Aceldama as a final hope after an arid and difficult spiritual quest:
Master! I think that I have found thee now:
Deceive me not, I trust thee, I am sure
Thy love will stand while ocean winds endure.
Our quest shall be our quest till either brow
Radiate light, till death himself allure
Our love to him
When life’s desires are filled beyond the silver brim.
If Aceldama was the outpouring of Crowley’s “unconscious self,” White Stains was—if you accept Crowley’s account—a conscious strategy by his artistic self to explore the roots of sexual and spiritual decay. The young Crowley invented—as the persona for the “magical affirmations” of White Stains—a young English poet named George Archibald Bishop (a snipe at Uncle Tom Bond Bishop), a contemporary of Swinburne and a forerunner of the Decadents; Bishop is identified on the title page as a “Neuropath of the Second Empire.” As if one authorial veil were not enough, Crowley coined another: An anonymous, sanctimonious editor who provides a scholarly “Preface” which warns that the book is for the eyes of “Mental Pathologists” alone. The poems that follow run the gamut of the prominent perversions in the judgment of the late Victorian era: lesbianism, homosexuality, bisexuality, bestiality, sadism, masochism, priapic lust worshipped as the life force, necrophilia.
It would have been legally imprudent for Crowley to adopt a less rigorous rationale for White Stains. Even in 1898, it was a necessary caution for publisher Smithers to have the typesetting done abroad by a Dutch firm. Crowley would not, or could not, publicly acknowledge that White Stains reflected his own sexual fears and desires. There is, for example, a joyous poem in praise of homosexual love in the bottom position, “A Ballad of Passive Paederastry,” which deserves a place in any wide-ranging anthology of gay poetry. Crowley’s own delight—and “shame”—with Pollitt as a lover is manifest:
Of man’s delight and man’s desire
In one thing is now weariness—
To feel the fury of the fire,
And writhe within the close caress
Of fierce embrace, and wanton kiss,
And final nuptial done aright,
How sweet a passion, shame, is this,
A strong man’s love is my delight!
There was, in addition to the “shame,” a further barrier between the two men. Pollitt had no enthusiasm for Crowley’s magic, no optimism to match Crowley’s own sense of possible attainments. As Crowley later wrote, “I felt in my subconscious self that I must choose between my devotion to him and to the Secret Assembly of the Saints.” The farewell scene between them is one of the very rare instances in the Confessions in which Crowley displays remorse and regret:
I told him frankly and firmly that I had given by life to religion and that he did not fit into the scheme. I see now how imbecile I was, how hideously wrong and weak it is to reject any part of one’s personality. Yet these mistakes are not mistakes at the time: one has to pass through such periods; one must be ruthless in analysis and complete it, before one can proceed to synthesis. He understood that I was not to be turned from my purpose and we parted, never to meet again.[ … ]
It has been my lifelong regret, for a nobler and purer comradeship never existed on this earth, and his influence might have done much to temper my subsequent trials.
The “part” of his “personality” that Crowley here tacitly acknowledged having rejected was his homosexual aspect. Pollitt went on to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War One. He died in London in 1942.
As Crowley’s Cambridge years came to an end in May 1898, he had reached a life resolution. He would find the Hidden Church, the Secret Assembly of Chiefs, alluded to by Eckartshausen. He had no career ambitions; the inheritance from father Edward had made them unnecessary, at least for the time being. Meanwhile, he spent as he wished. His youthful profligacy would come to haunt Crowley in the final decades of his life, when—having exhausted the fortune that, carefully husbanded, could have sustained him for life—he would live for extended periods on the bitter edge of poverty. Crowley blamed Bishop and mother Emily for his lack of thrift: “I was taught to expect every possible luxury. Nothing was too good for me; and I had no idea of what anything cost. It was all paid for behind my back[ … ] I doubt whether any one in history was ever furnished with such a completely rotten preparation for the management of practical affairs.”
One can only wonder as to the result had Bishop seriously attempted to restrict Crowley’s spending; as it was, Crowley strongly resented his uncle’s restraints on allowable pocket money (as opposed to credit)—in the vain hope that limits on cash would discourage splurges on books, theater, tobacco, and women. Crowley’s later magical philosophy forbade both the earning of money through magic and any haggling over the price of books and materials necessary to one’s magical work.
If Crowley had no practical career in mind, he nonetheless was fired by at least one worldly aspiration. Fame, above all, was the laurel he wished for. So intent was Crowley that, in its pursuit, he had chosen a new first name for himself while at Cambridge. A book he had read suggested that the ideal measure for a famous name was a dactyl followed by a trochee. Crowley had long loathed his common first name of Alick, particularly because “it was the name by which my mother called me.”
And so Crowley chose Aleister, a variant Gaelic form of his middle name Alexander, and an homage to the contemplative hero of Shelley’s poem, “Alastor of The Spirit of Solitude.” A
leister Crowley was thus born, a name Crowley described tellingly in the Confessions as a “nom de guerre.” He added sanguinely that “I can’t say that I feel sure that I facilitated the process of becoming famous. I should doubtless have done so, whatever name I had chosen.”
CHAPTER TWO
In Which Aleister Crowley Takes the Magical Name Perdurabo (“I Shall Endure to the End”) But Appears to Lose His Way Amidst the Schisms of the Golden Dawn and the Temptations of this Vale of Tears (1898–1900)
In three spheres—poetry, mountain climbing, and spiritual truth—Crowley yearned for ultimate achievement, while possessing but a callow understanding of the world outside the manicured lawns of Trinity. The loftiness of his goals, and the persistent onset of unforeseen difficulties, combined to produce in him a fervor and a tension that set him apart from his contemporaries. For good or ill, the Crowley of young manhood was a figure whom none, it would seem, could encounter without vehement reaction.
In each of these three spheres, Crowley retained—for all his ambition—a realistic sense of himself as a mere aspirant. As a result, he was open to influence from friends and mentors to an extent that had not showed itself since the death of his father eleven years before, and would not recur in his maturity. Thus, in the year following his May 1898 departure from Cambridge, Crowley formed a series of remarkably fateful friendships.
The first of these—which one could assign to the sphere of artistic ambition—was begun in a Cambridge bookshop in May 1898, just as Crowley was about to leave academia behind. Crowley’s debut volume of verse, Aceldama, drew the interest of an undergraduate, four years Crowley’s junior, named Gerald Festus Kelly. Soon thereafter, Kelly met Crowley who, with his large, dark eyes and lank of brown hair falling over his brow, fit the part of the soulful poet. Kelly had more the look of a bantam, with a thrusting chin and a patrician nose and brow.
Kelly would go on to enjoy a career as one of the foremost British portrait painters of the twentieth century. By the time of his death in 1972, he was Sir Gerald Kelly, the onetime president of the august British Royal Academy. His youthful friendship with the notorious Aleister Crowley had become, in retrospect, an embarrassment. But it was a vital friendship in its time, fostered by shared artistic ambitions and by certain formative parallels in their backgrounds.
For Kelly was also the son of a clergyman, the Reverend Frederick Festus Kelly, the Anglican vicar of St. Giles. The reverend did his utmost to instill religion in his son, but failed. So it was that both Kelly and Crowley looked upon Cambridge as a sanctuary from the restraints of family and religion. Both, of course, continued to draw financially upon their well-heeled families. Kelly, in his later years, offered a simple explanation of what drew them together. “I liked him; we made each other laugh; but he was a poseur, a great pretender to scholarship and languages.” The sense of Crowley as a poseur came much later for Kelly. In his youth, he regarded Crowley as the most religious man he had ever met—including his own pious father. Crowley succeeded, in the first years of their friendship, in enticing Kelly to dabble in magical ritual. Dabbling was as far as Kelly went. Their strongest bond was their support of one another as emerging artists. From 1898 to 1905, Crowley submitted virtually all of his poetry to Kelly for initial comment. When Kelly was, on rare occasion, disapproving, Crowley was genuinely anguished.
In the summer of 1898, Crowley formed his second great friendship of this year. Oscar Eckenstein, sixteen years Crowley’s senior, was a mountain climber who embodied the physical and mental discipline that Crowley saw as the essential values of athleticism. As Crowley later put it with admirable candor. “Eckenstein recognized from the first the value of my natural instincts for mountaineering, and also that I was one of the silliest young asses alive.” It was to Eckenstein that Crowley would owe his considerable progress as a climber.
Eckenstein was born in London in 1859, the son of a German socialist father and an English mother. Iconoclasm was a family trademark, and Eckenstein manifested it by growing a massive brown beard, dressing with absolute disregard for his appearance, and walking about London—in good weather and bad—in straw sandals. For all this vigorous activity, Eckenstein suffered from the same chronic asthma as did Crowley.
Eccentricities aside, Eckenstein was a markedly practical man. He took degrees in chemistry at London and Bonn, and early on secured a position as a railway engineer that afforded him financial security and the flexibility to travel abroad for long periods, so as to pursue his passion for mountaineering. In 1892, Eckenstein was a key member of the expedition led by Sir William Martin Conway to the Karakoam range of the Himalayas; Eckenstein later wrote an acerbic account, The Karakoams and Kashmir: an account of a journey (1896), in which the patronizing use of “journey” made it clear that Eckenstein viewed the famed Conway as a timid leader and a spoiled favorite of the Alpine Club—a British institution that Eckenstein, remarkably, managed to despise even more than did Crowley. (Unlike Crowley, however, Eckenstein never applied for admission.)
Eckenstein shared with Crowley a passion for the writings of Sir Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer and man of letters. Eckenstein amassed a rare collection of books and documents by or relating to Burton that he later bequeathed to the Royal Asiatic Society. There is this testimony from a friend of Eckenstein’s, a fellow railroad man: “O.E. often spoke of him [Burton] to me, in our talks about the philosophies of India and the East, and I do know that it was O.E.’s and Burton’s intense interest in Eastern philosophies, especially mental telepathy, which brought them together at one time.” Telepathy is a technique utilized by advanced Sufis, with whom Burton had studied firsthand during his travels. Whether Eckenstein possessed knowledge of Sufi techniques is unknown. Oddly, Eckenstein seems never to have confided his meeting with Burton to Crowley, for Crowley surely would have mentioned it in the Confessions, which included this paean to the two men: “Sir Richard Burton was my hero and Eckenstein his modern representative, so far as my external life was concerned.” Eckenstein would come to take a role in the development of Crowley’s inner as well as “external” life, and perhaps the connection with Burton explains why he was capable of doing so.
How distinguished a climber was Eckenstein? The question is important, because Crowley claimed so very much for his friend—and, tangentially, for himself—as a tactician and mountaineer. The world records (at the time) asserted by Crowley for Eckenstein and himself included “the greatest pace uphill over 16,000 feet—4,000 feet in 1 hour 23 minutes on Iztaccihuatl in 1900.” This was a peak in Mexico on which Crowley and Eckenstein trained together in preparation for their 1902 Himalayan expedition to Chogo Ri or K2 (the world’s second highest mountain), an adventure to be described in Chapter Three, which produced a putative world record of its own—“the greatest number of days spent on a glacier—65 days on the Baltoro.” The Alpine Club never recognized these achievements, but then it is doubtful that Crowley or Eckenstein ever informed the Club of them.
As for athleticism and technique, Crowley recalled that “Eckenstein, provided he could get three fingers on something that could be described by a man far advanced in hashish as a ledge, would be smoking his pipe on that ledge a few seconds later, and none of us could tell how he had done it; whereas I, totally incapable of the mildest gymnastic feats, used to be able to get up all sorts of places that Eckenstein could not attempt.” There is testimony from other climbers of the era on Eckenstein, and their judgment does not fall altogether short of Crowley’s lavish praise. Tom Longstaff, a future Alpine Club president, regarded Eckenstein as “a rough diamond, but a diamond nonetheless.” But the verdict of the Alpine Journal (a publication of the Alpine Club) was that “Eckenstein, though a competent climber, and ever ready to discuss his theories, generally left the lead on a climb to someone else.” As will be seen, Eckenstein did take the lead in his Himalayan expedition with Crowley—with decidedly mixed results.
There were, however, two achievements in mountaine
ering as to which praise for Eckenstein is unanimous. The first is the development of the “Eckenstein crampon,” a metal clawlike device that enabled climbers to traverse icy slopes without constantly cutting steps. The second was in climbing theory. Eckenstein was the first major proponent of what has come to be called “balance climbing”—a careful control and use of the body that was, in the judgment of one climbing historian, “ultimately to revolutionize the standards of rock work” by applying “the problems of climbing difficult rocks the principles of stress and strain which he [Eckenstein] used in his [engineering] work.”
During their first summer of climbing together, in 1898, Crowley and Eckenstein, with a small number of fellow climbers, were encamped in the Alps on the Schonbuhl glacier below the Dent Blanche. Even in this difficult setting, Crowley kept up with his esoteric studies. The book that most occupied him was a tome—ponderous in style, perplexing in content—entitled The Kabbalah Revealed, which consisted of English translations of certain sections of the Jewish Zohar (Book of Splendor), based on the sixteenth-century Latin versions of the Christian kabbalist Knorr von Rosenroth. The English translator was one Samuel Liddell Mathers, an impoverished, English-born autodidact and occultist who had taken on a second middle name, MacGregor, based on his alleged noble descent from that Scottish clan. The name MacGregor Mathers was unfamiliar to Crowley. It would not remain so for long.
Crowley’s health began to suffer during the lengthy encampment on the glacier, and he decided to come down to the town of Zermatt for some relaxation. One evening, in a beer hall, Crowley began carrying on about alchemy in hopes of impressing his drinking companion. Much to Crowley’s chagrin, his companion knew a great deal more about the subject than he did. This was Julian Baker, a man some ten years Crowley’s senior, who made a living in London as an analytical chemist and had conducted some practical work in alchemy. The knowledge displayed by Baker sparked a desperate determination in Crowley. The next morning, Baker checked out of the hotel in which he and Crowley were both guests. When Crowley learned of this sudden departure, he chased down Baker—who was hiking—after a pursuit on foot of some ten miles. At that point, Crowley shared with Baker his yearnings for spiritual brotherhood. Baker hinted that he knew of just such a brotherhood, and that, once back in London, he could introduce Crowley to a man who was, by Baker’s assessment, “much more of a Magician than I am.”
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