For Crowley, the prospect could not have been more enticing. In late summer, he left off his Alpine pursuits and returned to establish himself in the imperial capital of his homeland. In the previous year of 1897, London had been the site of the Diamond Jubilee—a glorious celebration of the stability of Victoria’s reign and of the Empire, which now extended over one-quarter of the land surface of the planet. In the late 1890s, for those with the requisite fortune, it was London, not Paris, that prevailed as the center of elegance. Small wonder that the young Crowley would soon yield to a goodly number of its temptations.
But Crowley persevered in searching out the secret brotherhood. Baker, in September, fulfilled his promise to introduce Crowley to a greater magician. This was George Cecil Jones—the third great friend to emerge in 1898—a gaunt and bearded Welshman five years Crowley’s senior who, in Crowley’s view, “bore a striking resemblance to many conventional representations of Jesus Christ.” Like Baker, Jones earned a living as an analytical chemist, and Crowley admired the “scientific spirit” that Jones brought to his magical studies. Jones lived to the south of London in Basingstoke; Crowley became an ongoing houseguest and promptly began his first guided lessons in magical practice.
Jones would remain a trusted ally of Crowley’s for the next decade. He was a thoroughly decent man devoted to the magical development of his will and imagination, who recognized the same ambitions in Crowley and gave the young man a grounding in the rudiments, including the art of astral travel and the meditational practices outlined in a text entitled The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. While there is a claim in the Abra-Melin manuscript that it was translated into French from Hebrew in 1458, the original Hebrew manuscript has never been found and scholarly opinion now places Abra-Melin as an eighteenth-century pseudonymous work. Details of provenance aside, its quietist approach to magical attainment offered precisely that which Crowley found lacking in traditional grimoires, or magical textbooks, which were “better adapted to the ambitions of love-sick agricultural labourers than to those of educated people with a serious purpose.” By contrast, the aim of Abra-Melin is to produce—after six months of seclusion devoted to an ever-heightening discipline of meditation, prayer, and study—the combined mystical and magical result of “attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.” The successful completion of the course of practice set forth in Abra-Melin became an obsession with Crowley over the next eight years of his life; we shall review his attempts in due course.
Meanwhile, Jones and Baker were agreed that the time was right to introduce Crowley to the magical society of which they were members. Indeed, both men had contravened their oaths to that society by instructing Crowley in its secret techniques. But further progress now necessitated formal contact. So it was that Jones proposed Crowley for membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which had been in existence for some eleven years, since 1887.
With gratifying rapidity, the initiation of Aleister Crowley as a Neophyte of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was scheduled for the evening of November 18, 1898. The setting was Mark Masons’ Hall in London—a less than grand edifice despite the imposing name. But Crowley approached the ritual at a high pitch of tension and expectation. He inquired of Baker if it was common for people to die during the ceremony. As Crowley later allowed: “I had no idea that it was a flat formality and that the members were for the most part muddled middle-class mediocrities. I saw myself entering the Hidden Church of the Holy Grail. This state of my soul served me well. My initiation was in fact a sacrament.”
The task of the Neophyte ritual is to transform the consciousness of the “Candidate” by severing the continuity of his life and directing him upon the hitherto invisible spiritual path. Entry into the Golden Dawn meant, as its name implied, an awakening to the light. The yearning for light, and the blindness and material bondage of the Candidate seeking it, were hallmarks of the Neophyte ritual. Crowley would have been led robed and hoodwinked into the consecrated Temple. About his robe would have been three cords symbolizing the restricting powers of Nature, and more subtly, the potential spiritual purity of the human mind as symbolized by the three highest kabbalistic sephiroth, known as the Three Supernals. At the East of the Temple sat the representative figures of the Three Chiefs of the Outer Order. Behind them was a kabbalistic Veil of Paroketh that separated this Outer Order Neophyte ceremony from the higher wisdom of the Second Order, yet intimated that such higher wisdom was to come. For those Candidates receptive to the drama of ritual—and Crowley was such a one—the Neophyte ceremony was an experience never to be forgotten.
The layout of the Temple, including obelisks and a central altar, were suggestive of the lower sephiroth of the kabbalistic Tree of Life. At this point the Candidate was entering the lowest and most earthly of the sephiroth, Malkuth, and hence he would be designated, as the ritual proceeded, as “child of Earth.” Early on, the Candidate is “sealed” with a motto; that chosen by Crowley was Perdurabo (I shall endure to the end). It was a statement of concentrated will as to his magical ambitions that Crowley would live by unflinchingly. Shortly thereafter there came an oath “to keep inviolate the secrets and mysteries of our Order.” Crowley would breach this oath fulsomely some eleven years later, in the aftermath of his break from Mathers.
After three “Mystic Circumambulations,” much solemn instruction and warnings as to the difficulties of the path ahead, the candidate is made to kneel and then to rise again. The hoodwink and bandages are removed. The Hierophant—symbolic of the Candidate’s Higher Self—addresses him thusly: “Child of Earth, long hast thou dwelt in Darkness! Quit the Night, and seek the day.” Then would come the proclamation: “Frater Perdurabo, we receive thee into the Order of the Golden Dawn!” And then the mystic words “Khabs Am Pekht” (in Egyptian) and “Konx Om Pax” (in Greek) meaning “Light in Extension”—the extending of the supernal light to the highest faculties of the Candidate, no longer a mere “Child of Earth.”
Crowley would seldom fail, in his future diaries, to note November 18, 1898, as the anniversary of his first initiation.
* * *
What was the nature of the Golden Dawn, such that it could offer to an intelligence as demanding as that of Crowley a ritual that transformed him? The mysterious circumstances surrounding the formation of the Golden Dawn have received extensive attention from scholars and will be only briefly told here. The story of its rise and fall serves as a parable of the astonishing range and potential—and the appalling pretentions—of those on the magical path. Crowley would come to play his own part in the history of the Golden Dawn, and he too would mirror these extremes. Most importantly, he would take away from his brief active period in that society—from November 1898 to April 1900—the framework of scholarship, symbolism and ritual that would permeate his writings throughout his life.
One must bear in mind that to be a member of an occult secret society in Crowley’s time was a far different affair than in the “cult”-conscious atmosphere of present times. There was then a sense of participating in a grand but hidden tradition that was intertwined with the history of Europe—and was now carried on by a daring and enlightened avant-garde. In the 1890s, interest in the occult had reached a peak not only in Britain but also on the Continent. Paris had become a center of esoteric activity, with a number of self-styled Rosicrucian groups. The inspiration for much of the magic in Paris was Eliphas Levi, the nom de plume of Alphonse Louis Constant, a onetime candidate for the Catholic priesthood who, after a struggle of conscience, found truths better suited to his tastes in the hermetic tradition. Levi died in May 1875, some four months before Crowley was born. Crowley would, nonetheless, later claim Levi as one of his previous incarnations, Levi’s soul having passed into the fetus Crowley in utero.
The London success of the Theosophical Society sprang full blown from the inventions of its principal founder, the famed and flamboyant Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian-b
orn self-proclaimed medium and seer. In her massive works, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky offered an imaginative and rhetorically powerful syncretist blending of Western esotericism and Eastern mysticism, and attempted as well to heal the rift between science and religion in the West by pointing to their common ultimate aims. Blavatsky specified, as the source of the wisdom offered in her writings, perfected “Mahatmas” who dwelled in Tibet and were called upon to watch over the evolution of humankind and lead it into a new age of Universal Brotherhood.
Among those stirred by Blavatsky was the poet William Butler Yeats. Yeats would go on to play a critical role in the history of the Golden Dawn and in Crowley’s own magical development, as we shall see. In an 1892 letter, the poet declared:
If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. It holds to my work the same relation that the philosophy of Godwin held to the work of Shelley and I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance—the revolt of the soul against the intellect—now beginning in the world.
Yeats credited to his Golden Dawn years a magical teaching—the training of the astral vision—“that has been perhaps the intellectual chief influence on my life up to perhaps my fortieth year.” In its beginning stages, this method employs intensely colored “Tattwa” symbols representing the four primary elements and the fifth element of akasha, or spirit, as well as their subdivisions and combinations. As Yeats progressed, he found that rituals of evocation, as well as intensive prayer, could induce still more intense visions. In his memoirs, Yeats was scrupulous in acknowledging both the lasting influence of these visions upon his art and the limited nature of their import upon his spiritual development: “I allowed my mind to drift from image to image, and these images began to affect my writing, making it more sensuous and more vivid. I believed that with the images would come at last more profound states of the soul, and so lived in vain hope.”
A key difference between Yeats and Crowley—as fellow initiates into the Golden Dawn—emerges here. For Crowley, the hope would not, by his own judgment, prove vain. Crowley lacked the humility of Yeats, but Crowley’s ardor and capacity for magical practice were the greater. But Yeats did not doubt the efficacy of magic. The poet performed a magical healing on his uncle, George Pollexfen (also a Golden Dawn initiate) in the period 1894–95. Pollexfen had fallen ill from polluted smallpox vaccine. Yeats came to his bedside: “He was in delirium and with a high temperature, and when I asked what he saw said ‘red dancing figures.’ Without saying what I was doing I used the symbol of water and the divine names connected in the kabalistic system with the moon. Presently he said that he saw a river flowing through the room and sweeping all the red figures away.”
Amidst the welter of secret societies during this period, two characters now step to center stage as the principal founders of the Golden Dawn: William Wynn Westcott and the aforementioned Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. To Westcott goes the honor of setting the marvelous apparatus of the Golden Dawn into motion. Westcott had earned a medical degree at University College, London, but his primary interests were in esoteric learning. In 1887, he took the first decisive steps to create the Golden Dawn. There continues to be controversy, in both esoteric and scholarly circles, as to the circumstances of its founding, but the traditional account, in basic terms, is as follows: In August 1887, the Reverend A. F. A. Woodford, who was active in Masonic circles, gave to Westcott some sixty pages (found in a secondhand bookstall) of what has come to be known as the “Cypher MS.” Woodford died four months later, thus depriving the curious of his testimony. The cipher or artificial alphabet of the manuscript derived from a work of Renaissance occult scholarship with which Westcott was familiar, the Polygraphia of Abbot Johann Trithemius. Upon deciphering it, Westcott saw that he had come upon an extended skeletal outline for a series of five initiatory rituals. There were certain Masonic influences, but the rituals allowed for both “Fratres” and “Sorores”—men and women. The rituals also drew from alchemy, astrology, kabbalah, and the teachings of Eliphas Levi on the intertwined relationship between the twenty-two paths of the kabbalistic Tree of Life and the twenty-two Trumps of the Tarot deck. Enclosed with them was a cover letter of sorts—written in the same cipher—which gave the name and forwarding address of one Fräulein Anna Sprengel, an exalted Rosicrucian who lived in Stuttgart, Germany, and who was a Chief Adept in a secret society called “die Goldene Dämmerung.” In Westcott’s translation this became “the Golden Dawn.”
Between 1887 and 1890, there was an alleged correspondence between Westcott and Sprengel, whose magical motto was Sapiens dominabitur astris (the wise person will be ruled by the stars) or “S.D.A.”, as her secretary signed her letters. In 1890, a Frater of S.D.A. wrote to Westcott with the news of her sudden death and the unequivocal statement that no further communications would be forthcoming from Germany. But the intervening years had accomplished their purpose: the establishment, in Britain, of the Golden Dawn, an occult secret society with links to a purported continental esoteric tradition. In just over a decade, the question of the authenticity of the Cypher MS. and of Fräulein Sprengel and her Goldene Dämmerung would rage with sufficient fury to rend the Golden Dawn asunder.
The wiser Golden Dawn members came, soon enough, to see Fräulein Sprengel and her revelations as a kind of fable, bitter or sweet or irrelevant, depending upon one’s temperament. Arthur Machen, whose tales of the supernatural remain classics of the genre, was initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1899 but remained only briefly active. Machen later observed of the society’s founding that “so ingeniously was this occult fraud ‘put upon the market’ that, to the best of my belief, the flotation remains a mystery to this day. But what an entertaining mystery; and, after all, it did nobody any harm.” Crowley—who refrained from passing final judgment on the existence of Fräulein Sprengel—termed the traditional account of the Golden Dawn’s founding as “probably fiction” but insisted that it was irrelevant in terms of the value of its magical teachings: “You will readily understand that the genuineness of the claim matters no whit, such literature being judged by itself, not by its reputed sources.”
Crowley’s own judgment of the Golden Dawn “literature” was that, amidst much prosaic ore, there was genuine gold in two of the rituals: those of the Neophyte and the Adeptus Minor grades. The chief author of these rituals, and the man who would supplant Jones as Crowley’s magical teacher, was Mathers. The parallels between Mathers and Crowley are such that one can see, in the figure of the future Beast of the New Aeon, an enduring palimpsest presence that is Mathers, the creator of that which was distinctly magical in the Golden Dawn. Unlike Westcott, who made no public claims of magical power, Mathers would hold himself forth to the members of the Golden Dawn as one who possessed a living connection to the more-than-human “Secret Chiefs”—the ultimate source of all occult wisdom. It was this latter claim by Mathers, perhaps, that would compel Crowley, the future prophet, not only to renounce his former teacher, but to revile his name. The connection to the Chiefs would be Crowley’s own.
As the foremost leader of what is, beyond doubt, the most famous magical society of modern times, Mathers stands forth in the dual and contrasting roles of inspired teacher and egomaniacal autocrat. The dozens of essays and lectures, as well as the Golden Dawn rituals themselves, testify to Mather’s ability to produce original writings of value. Yeats would delineate the change in Mathers over the years of his rule of the Golden Dawn: “I believe that his mind in those early days did not belie his face and body—though in later years it became unhinged, as Don Quixote’s was unhinged—for he kept a proud head amid great poverty.”
Little is known of the early life of Mathers. He was born the son of a commercial clerk in 1854. His father died when Mathers was young,
intensifying the bond between mother and son. Mathers lived with his mother in Bournemouth until her death in 1885, when he was thirty-one. Due in part to limited family resources, he received no university training and left school altogether at the age of sixteen after four years at Bedford Grammar, where he was grounded in classical studies. Westcott, six years Mathers’s senior but greatly his superior in wealth and formal education, became a patron for Mather’s studies, providing guidance as to suitable texts as well as financial assistance that enabled Mathers to move to London. Just as Crowley would later bristle at Mathers’s claims to power, Mathers chafed at the looming presence of Westcott.
Yeats acknowledged Mathers as an inspiration in his own spiritual development as a poet: “It was through him mainly that I began certain studies and experiences, that were to convince me that images well up before the mind’s eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory.” According to Yeats, Mathers bore the scar of a saber wound “got in some student riot that he had mistaken for the beginning of war.” In their discussion of the Jacobite battle for the crown of Britain, Yeats found that, for Mathers, “the eighteenth century controversy still raged. At night he would dress himself in Highland dress, and dance the sword dance, and his mind brooded upon the ramifications of clans and tartans.” Mathers’s devotion to physical training and competition led him to boxing. Yeats’s account is poignant: “One that boxed with him nightly has told me that for many weeks he could knock him down, though Mathers was the stronger man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Mathers starved.” The poet summarized the impact made by Mathers on so many Golden Dawn members:
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