Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  I may have been a pig-fancier in my youth; but for that very reason I should not attempt to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse [Rose]. It is the ignorant that make such mistakes. I have been trying since I joined the GD in ’98 steadily and well to repress my nature in all ways. I have suffered much, but I have won, and you know it. Coffin-worms and their like are as much chips (as opposed to coins) to me as to you. I wanted to seal my victory with a very mighty blow. If I failed, it is of over-generosity, over-trust in your real friendship for me, which you have after all.[ … ]

  Why must nine-tenths of my life i.e. the march to Buddhism, go for nothing; the atrophied one hundred thousandth always spring up and choke me, and that in the house of my friends?

  The “victory” referred to here is, it would seem, the final conquest of the “atrophied” homosexual element in his “nature” by means of the ultimate heterosexual ratification—marriage. This letter makes it plain that the decision to marry involved issues, for Crowley, that went far beyond Kelly family pressures on Rose. His own identity—and refuge—was being forged as well.

  Crowley later described the months following his marriage to Rose as “an uninterrupted sexual debauch.” Who, then, was the woman who had stirred in him such a deep and genuine passion, and how had the flames arisen of a sudden?

  Rose Edith Kelly was born in 1878, three years after Crowley. Her family was financially comfortable, and she was raised in the fashion of a Victorian gentlewoman—that is, trained in the social graces and excluded from academic or other achievement—the whole overlaid with Anglican propriety. In 1895, she married a Major Skerritt, R.A.M.C.; until he died two years later, they lived together in South Africa. Through the remainder of her twenties, until she met Crowley, she had affairs and lived, apparently, by means of the support of her dead husband’s estate and her own family. Crowley viewed Rose’s mother as the source of her daughter’s failings: “From her mother she [Rose] inherited dipsomania [alcoholism], and as bad a case for stealth, cunning, falsehood, treachery, and hypocrisy as the specialist I consulted had ever known. This was, however, latent during the satisfaction of sexuality, which ousted all else in her life, as it did in mine.”

  Whether her symptoms were entirely “latent” early on, or whether Crowley simply paid them no mind, by the end of their wedding day, the two were well on the way to being swept off their feet by each other. That evening, in their hotel in Dingwall, the newlyweds enjoyed a dinner of grouse during which a great deal of champagne was consumed. Thereafter, the bride retired to their room alone. Crowley was now taken with anxiety, wondering if even a marriage of convenience was suitable for an aspiring Buddhist. But he resolved to rise to the occasion as a poet and, seated in the hotel lobby, penned a passionate rondel to his bride that began: “Rose on the breast of the world of spring,/ I press my breast against thy bloom;/ My subtle life drawn out to thee; to thee/ its mood and meanings cling.” These latter two lines would prove to be precisely accurate.

  The newlyweds promptly became lovers. In his ever-present Oxford edition of Shelley, which had accompanied him to K2, there is a marginal entry dated August 19, 1903, one week after the wedding, alongside a verse in “Epipsychidion” (Greek for soul-union). Shelley argued, in that verse, that “True Love” is an expansive spiritual force, like “Imagination,” that develops best by “Gazing on many truths.” Shelley warned that:

  Narrow

  The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,

  The life that wears, the spirit that creates

  One object, and one form, and builds thereby

  A sepulchre for its eternity.

  This warning Crowley would not accept. His terse marginal correction to Shelley: “The error here is in supposing that one woman is only one: the right one is many million.” Directly beneath, there is a more humble entry dated August 10, 1907, almost exactly five years later: “Hats off to Shelley—he was right.” Such, in microcosm, was the course of the marriage.

  But what a glorious beginning! For all his subsequent disillusionment, Crowley never lost sight of what had enraptured him in those first years of marriage. Rose possessed a buoyant, adaptive, and adventurous personality, one capable of appreciating, as Crowley did, the dichotomous joys of aristocratic pleasure and rugged travel. She was a muse par excellence, inspiring the best love poems that Crowley would write. His summation of her in the Confessions sounds a rare note in Crowley’s writing on women—praise not only for her charms, but for her character: “Physically and morally, Rose exercised on every man she met a fascination which I have never seen anywhere else, not a fraction of it. She was like a character in a romantic novel, a Helen of Troy or a Cleopatra; yet, while more passionate, unhurtful. She was essentially a good woman. Her love sounded every abyss of lust, soared to every splendour of the empyrean.”

  From Dingwall, the newlyweds went on to Boleskine House to carry on a three-week honeymoon. The imminent arrival of the “red-headed Arabella,” whom Crowley had picked up in Edinburgh in July, was canceled. The request of the Reverend Kelly for a £10,000 dowry payment by Crowley (the reversal of the tradition by which a dowry was paid by the father of the bride) was not only refused, but countered by Crowley with the insistence (conveyed by way of letters to Gerald, with whom relations had again warmed) that correspondence to Crowley by the Kelly family be addressed to Lord Boleskine, a noble title embossed in gold on his envelopes. Meanwhile, at Boleskine, relations between Crowley and Rose blossomed. Crowley reported only one difficulty: “Once, in the first three weeks or so, Rose took some trifling liberty; I recognized the symptoms, and turned her up and spanked her. She henceforth added the qualities of perfect wife to those of perfect mistress. Women, like all moral inferiors, behave well only when treated with firmness, kindness and justice.” Crowley’s views here on proper manly behavior were anything but unique for his time.

  The two were so happy that they resolved to extend their honeymoon indefinitely. With the vague intention of ultimately paying a visit to Allan Bennett—who, as the monk Ananda Metteyya, was now residing in Rangoon, Burma—they set forth on a world tour of sorts. Their first stop was Paris. Crowley offered a sordid and almost certainly falsified vignette in the Confessions, in which he and Rose accidently met with Mina Mathers near the Pont Alexandre III. In Crowley’s account, Mina’s face was plastered with make-up, due to Mathers having forced her to pose naked in a prurient Montmartre show; Crowley further implied that Mina had become a prostitute with Mathers as her pimp. All others who knew the couple testified that their sexual fastidiousness was extreme. Crowley’s account, published after both their deaths, is the man at his worst.

  From Paris, the honeymoon continued through Marseilles and Naples. In November 1903, they arrived in Cairo, where Crowley resolved not only to visit the pyramids—a tourist stop he had omitted the year before—but to use the Great Pyramid itself as a site in which to impress his new wife with his magical powers. The plan was that they would spend the night in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. Crowley employed the “Bornless Ritual,” based on a Greco-Egyptian magical papyrus, and probably obtained from Bennett. The ritual—which invokes a multifaceted Godhead—would remain a favorite of Crowley’s. He read it on this night by candlelight. But the candle, according to Crowley, soon became unnecessary, as it was supplanted by “astral light”:

  The King’s Chamber was aglow as if with the brightest tropical moonlight. The pitiful dirty yellow flame of the candle was like a blasphemy, and I put it out. The astral light remained during the whole of the invocation and for some time afterwards, though it lessened in intensity as we composed ourselves to sleep.[ … ] In the morning, the astral light had completely disappeared and the only sound was the flitting of the bats.

  Crowley never wavered in his insistence that the light was “no subjective illusion,” but he did later deprecate this evening as an “exhibition game of magick.”

  From Cairo, they continued on to Ceylon. Shortly af
ter their arrival there in December, Rose announced to Crowley that she was pregnant. Their intention had been to continue on to China for a hunting expedition, but this changed with Rose’s news. Instead, they transferred the site of the expedition to Hambantota, in southeast Ceylon, and planned to return to Boleskine in time for the delivery of their child. December and early January were spent largely in camping and hunting. On January 7, 1904, while Rose was suffering from an attack of fever, Crowley sat at a camp table and composed “Rosa Mundi,” the highwater mark of his achievements as a lyric love poet. The title, which translates as Rose of the World, is a play upon a Rosicrucian symbol. Through his Golden Dawn training, the blossoming Rose on the Cross had become, for Crowley, a preeminent symbol of spiritual awakening from the elemental world unto eternity. But in this poem, the esoteric is blended with the erotic. The first of the nineteen stanzas is the most rhythmically admirable:

  Rose of the World!

  Red glory of the secret heart of Love:

  Red flame, rose-red, most subtly curled

  Into its own infinite flower, all flowers above!

  Its flower in its own perfumed passion,

  Its faint sweet passion, folded and furled

  In flower fashion;

  And my deep spirit taking its pure part

  Of that voluptuous heart

  Of hidden happiness!

  The poem appeared in Rosa Mundi and Other Love Songs (1905), published privately by Crowley under the pseudonym H. D. Carr.

  The hunting expedition ended, Rose and Crowley returned to Kandy, the site of the yoga training with Bennett some two years before. This time, Crowley’s stay was brief, and marked by the writing of a bitingly cynical verse play, Why Jesus Wept (1904), that portrays the downfall of an innocent young couple—just betrothed—through a series of calculated seductions. Rose’s pregnancy led the couple to cancel their proposed visit to Bennett in Rangoon. But they were in no hurry to return to England. When, on January 28, 1904, they took ship from the port of Colombo, their first principal destination was Cairo, where they landed on February 8. Having already displayed the Great Pyramid to his wife by means of astral light, Crowley resolved on an even grander gesture now. They would playact the part of Oriental royalty, as a denouement to their world-spanning honeymoon. Crowley would don the garb of an “Oriental despot” and take the name “Chioa Khan”—the former a transliteration of the Hebrew for “beast,” the latter an honorific title. “Chioa Khan” may thus be translated as “Great Beast.”

  Rose—now dubbed, by Crowley, Ouarda, the Arabic for “Rose”—accepted her role. But soon the play would take on far-different dimensions, and the course of the life of Aleister Crowley would be utterly transformed. Through the unforeseen aid of Ouarda the Seer he would return to magic, skeptical no longer, but seized, rather, by the commanding gods. That April, as the honeymoon came to an end, the seed of the fearsome New Aeon was sown.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Birth of the New Aeon (1904–05)

  In this chapter, the story is told of the episode that shaped the remainder of Crowley’s days—the contact he believed to have occurred on April 8, 9, and 10, 1904, with a being whom he sometimes described as a “praeternatural” intelligence, alternately spelled “Aiwass” and “Aiwaz,” who dictated to Crowley, as scribe and prophet, the Word of the New Aeon in the form of a gnomic and evocative three-chapter declamation (alternating freely between poetry and prose, and taking on the voices of three divinities) entitled, again alternately, The Book of the Law and Liber Legis (to name but two variations).

  The most famous sentence in this book, familiar to persons who know nothing else of Crowley, is: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” This dictum evokes immediate unease, even fear. With its insistent staccato monosyllables, it testifies to the visceral impact of The Book of the Law. Make of that book what you will, it has had a fitful but persistent life from the time it was first written to the close of the twentieth century. And there is every indication that it will continue to exercise an influence on the century to come.

  Crowley emphasized that, for The Book of the Law to be assessed intelligently, the context in which it was revealed to him had to be understood. Yet so perplexed was Crowley himself by this context that he attempted in three different works, widely separated in time—The Temple of Solomon the King (1910), The Confessions (1929), and The Equinox of the Gods (1936)—to clarify what had happened. There were further such accounts in letters and essays composed throughout the rest of his life. Crowley was literally obsessed with setting the record straight.

  But for all his efforts, there remain questions, controversy, and wonderment. This chapter will seek not so much to dispel these—an impossibility, in any event—as to intensify them. A detailed investigation of the facts was anticipated—even invited—by Crowley. In The Equinox of the Gods he declared that “at the outset” one should study “the whole of the external circumstances connected with the Writing of the Book, whether they are of biographical or other importance. He should thus be able to approach the Book with his mind prepared to apprehend the unique character of their [sic] contents in respect of Its true Authorship, the peculiarities of Its methods of communicating Thought, and the nature of Its claim to be the Canon of Truth, the Key of Progress, and the Arbiter of Conduct.” Crowley asked to be believed on the basis of the facts of his life as he presented them. Indeed, he was ardent to be believed—so ardent that his pleading could, at times, become a cry of desperation at a world that would not grant the truth of his contact “with a Being of intelligence and power immensely subtler and greater than aught we can call human,” nor recognize his vocation as prophet. And yet, in fulfillment of his first magical name, Perdurabo, he would persist unto the end: “I, Aleister Crowley, declare upon my honour as a gentleman that I hold this revelation a million times more important than the discovery of the Wheel, or even of the Laws of Physics or Mathematics. Fire and Tools made Man master of his planet; Writing developed his mind; but his Soul was a guess until the Book of the Law proved this.”

  Bearing in mind both the intensity of Crowley’s desire to persuade (for all that the Book disparaged reasoned persuasion) and the earnestness of his efforts to set the record straight, let us proceed to examine his accounts. It was an extended honeymoon that would lead Crowley to the New Aeon. And it is with the return of the married couple to Cairo that we now begin.

  * * *

  Crowley and Rose, “Chioa Khan” and “Ouarda,” arrived in Cairo on February 9, 1904. Crowley was frank as to the motives behind his title and costume:

  I was not for a moment deceived by my own pretext that I wanted to study Mohammedanism, and in particular the mysticism of the fakir, the Darwesh and the Sufi, from within, when I proposed to pass myself in Egypt for a Persian prince with a beautiful English wife. I wanted to swagger about in a turban with a diamond aigrette and sweeping silken robes or a coat of cloth of gold, with a jewelled talwar by my side, and two gorgeous runners to clear the way for my carriage through the streets of Cairo.

  There was no doubt a certain brooding of the Holy Spirit of Magick upon the still waters of my soul; but there is little evidence of its operation.

  This stress upon “little evidence” was Crowley’s way of insisting that the revelation of the New Aeon—now only three weeks away—was neither anticipated nor desired.

  Crowley did study, while in Cairo, with an unnamed “sheikh” who taught him the rudiments of Arabic and of Islamic prayer ritual. Crowley claimed that this sheikh was “profoundly versed in the mysticism and magic of Islam” and that, because he recognized Crowley as an “initiate,” provided him with writings on the “Arabic Cabbala” that Crowley would subsequently incorporate into his occult reference compendium 777 (1909). Further, he taught Crowley “many of the secrets of the Sidi Aissawa [a Sufi order]; how to run a stiletto through one’s cheek without drawing blood, lick red-hot swords, eat live scorpions, etc.” Some of these Crow
ley allowed were mere “conjuror’s tricks,” but others were “genuine Magick; that is, the scientific explanation is not generally known.” The list of seeming wonders that Crowley sets forth here should not be dismissed; such performances have been witnessed by many observers, not only in Egypt but throughout the Near East and India. There is, however, no record of Crowley himself having performed them.

  During this period of study, Crowley also devoted a good deal of time to his golf game. He kept a diary, albeit a sketchy one (Crowley would later rue its “incomplete and fragmentary” nature) that revealed a marked ambivalence about himself and his doings. For Crowley was sporadically inserting deliberately misleading or outright false entries—“blinds,” as he termed them—so as to make the full decipherment of this diary impossible for any outside reader. In the Western esoteric tradition, a “blind” refers to a deliberate stylistic technique by which the true spiritual meaning of a writing is concealed from the untrained or profane reader. The question thus arises: Why use blinds for diary entries which, as Crowley himself insisted, reflected a life without spiritual focus?

  There is a second, shorter diary from this time, entitled The Book of Results, that covers the week from March 16 to March 23. As to this diary, Crowley mentions no blinds, and his later memory proved of substantially greater assistance in elucidating its cryptic entries. The central character in this diary is not Crowley but his wife, Rose, or “Ouarda,” indicated by the phonetic initial “W.” A few fragmented quotes transcribed by Crowley in The Book of Results constitute the sole record of what Rose had to say about the events of this period. Crowley portrayed her as a suddenly arisen seeress—spellbound and insistent. On March 16, in an avowedly frivolous attempt to impress his wife, he recited the same “Bornless One” invocation employed, the previous November, in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. This time his aim was to enable his wife to see “sylphs”—lower astral beings, or elementals, who inhabit the spiritual element of air. But Rose could see no sylphs, and this vexed her husband. He was vexed even further by her claim to have become “inspired” and her repeated insistence that “They’re waiting for you!” The next day, March 17, Crowley invoked Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and magic. In his diary, he termed the invocation a “great success”; a later comment offers this motive for the invocation—“presumably to clear up the muddle.” The muddle was Rose, who was continuing on this day to make odd, fragmentary statements—“all about the child” and “all Osiris.”