Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  He had repeatedly escaped from death in manners almost miraculous. “Then I am some use after all!” was his conclusion. “I am indeed SENT to do something.” For whom? For the Universe; no partial good could possibly satisfy his equation. “I am, then, the ‘chosen Priest and Apostle of Infinite Space.’ Very good: and what is the message? What shall I teach men?” And like the lightning from heaven fell upon him these words: “THE KNOWLEDGE AND CONVERSATION OF THE HOLY GUARDIAN ANGEL.”

  The attainment of the “Holy Guardian Angel” is, of course, the magico-mystical end of the Abra-Melin Operation. Again, Crowley was turning his spirit to this uncompleted—and, to his own mind, essential—aspect of his development. He would devote, not only the coming months in China, but nearly the entirety of the year 1906 to its attainment. As one might expect, Crowley began to experiment radically with the ritual methods put forth in Abra-Melin, until, he believed, he had fashioned the essence of its Operation as his daily magical task.

  This experimentation proceeded in stages. As the trek progressed, Crowley continued with his Sammasati meditation, exploring the causal roots of his karma even as he acknowledged that “cause” was itself an illusory concept. It was in this period that the word “Augoeides” arose in Crowley’s thoughts as the name of the central god-form of his transformed Abra-Melin Operation. “Augoeides” signifies one’s Higher Genius in Golden Dawn teachings. The classical Greek meaning is “glittering” or “self-glittering one” and was employed by the third-century Neoplatonist Iamblichus in his De Mysteriis. “Augoeides” now became the new name of Crowley’s Holy Guardian Angel in daily invocations.

  Their first major stop on Chinese soil, in early January 1906, was Tengyueh (modern-day Tengchong), where the British consul, one Litton, earned Crowley’s admiration. Litton advised him that one could not fraternize with the lower-class Chinese, as they did not (in Crowley’s words) “respect any man who acts as their own mandarins act; with absolute lack of sympathy, justice or any other human feelings. They treat the traveller well in proportion as he is overbearing, haughty and avaricious.” As we shall see, Crowley embraced this advice to the hilt.

  Crowley and family pushed farther north, and relations between Crowley and his porters took a turn for the worse. As Crowley told it, one of the porters, Johnny White, was given a pony to ride due to his status as Crowley’s translator:

  [N]aturally he had to be content with a somewhat sorry screw, while my own pony was a fairly decent animal. He thought the time ripe to attempt to force me to ‘lose face’; that is, to become an object of ridicule to the porters. If he had succeeded, I need hardly point out, there would have been an end of all discipline and we should probably have been robbed and murdered in short order. His idea was to start out ahead of us on my pony. I did not find out what had happened for some time.

  When I did, I set out on foot at top speed after him. In two or three hours I came up with the culprit. As luck would have it, he was crossing a steep hillside; below the path were gigantic thorn bushes. I came up quietly and unperceived, put my left hand under his right foot and with one deft jerk flung him from the saddle into a thorn bush. It was quite impossible for him to extricate himself, the bush being very large and elastic, the thorns long and persuasive. So I waited, peacefully smoking, until the porters began to arrive, when I got up and gave him a whack with my whalebone whip as each man passed. When all had gone by, I mounted my pony and followed.[ … ] It was not I who had ‘lost face’ with the porters! And I had no more trouble of any kind for the rest of the journey to Yunnanfu.

  As with the ice ax used against the porter on Kanchenjunga, Crowley’s justification for his violence in this case was necessity—the need to maintain his own absolute authority in a time of crisis. But Crowley acknowledged, on other occasions, an element of sadism within himself. One may doubt, then, whether he could consistently refrain from unneeded violence, particularly when inflicted upon persons of a racial and social rank—as ruled colonials—well below his own.

  How, it might be wondered, could such conduct occur simultaneously with the spiritual meditations conduced by the Adeptus Exemptus Frater OY MH? Crowley felt that he was proceeding through China on two distinct planes at once—of ordinary and magical consciousness. The isolation of the trek was crucial here. As Crowley explained it, all the prior life forces which had “impinged on my normal direction” had been removed:

  For the first time in my life I was really free. I had no personality left. To take a concrete case: I found myself in the middle of China with a wife and child. I was no longer influenced by love for them, no longer interested in protecting them as I had been; but there was a man, Aleister Crowley, husband and father, of a certain caste, of certain experience, of travel in remote parts of the world; and it was his business to give them his undivided love, care and protection. He could do this very much more efficiently than before when I was aware of what he was doing, and consequently inclined to play the part.

  There is a strange juxtaposition in chronology at this point, one that bears out Crowley’s sense of a divided self. On February 11, two days after the thornbush episode, Crowley decided that he could perform the Abra-Melin Operation while trekking through the wilds of China—a decided contrast from the secluded temple setting called for by the text itself. His diary entry for that day is brief yet exalted: “Made many resolutions of a G[reat] R[etirement]. In dream flew to me an Angel, bearing an ankh [crux ansata or cross of life], to encourage me.” As Crowley saw it, the dream ended a phase of intellectual insanity—the death of ordinary reason—that had endured since the previous November. The Operation of Abra-Melin would now reintegrate his consciousness on a higher plane.

  As the text for his daily invocations, Crowley employed the “Bornless Ritual” first taught to him by Allan Bennett in 1899. The “Bornless Ritual” was an elaborate stylistic expansion (most likely by Bennett himself) of a surviving fragment of a Graeco-Egyptian ritual. Crowley now used this ritual “to work up a current, to acquire concentration, to invoke often.” Its opening lines confirm the primal status of the god (in this case, Augoeides) being summoned:

  Thee I invoke, the Bornless one.

  Thee, that didst create the Earth and the Heavens:

  Thee, that didst create the Night and the Day.

  [ … ]

  Thou didst make the Female and the Male.

  Thou didst produce the Seed and the Fruit.

  Thou didst form Men to love one another, and to hate one another.

  The seeming boundary between the human and the divine falls away at last, consumed by the magical enflaming of the aspirant:

  I am He! the Bornless Spirit! having sight in the Feet: Strong, and the Immortal Fire!

  I am He! the Truth!

  I am He! Who hate that evil should be wrought in the World!

  [ … ]

  I am He; the Grace of the World:

  “The Heart Girt with a Serpent” is My Name!

  Some sense of the physical technique Crowley utilized for this invocation is given in Liber Samekh (an expanded version of the ritual, written in 1921):

  Let the muscles take grip on themselves as if one were wrestling. Let the jaw and mouth, in particular, be tightened to the utmost. Breathe deeply, slowly, yet strongly. Keep mastery over the mind by muttering forcibly and audibly. But lest such muttering tend to disturb communion with the Angel, speak only His Name.

  In his diary he noted the varying impact upon these invocations of road conditions, the difficulties of horseback travel, and his own health and moods. To create a suitable “temple”—on the order of the physical temple he had constructed in Boleskine in 1900—he employed his Golden Dawn training in astral travel:

  My plan was to transport the astral form of my temple at Boleskine to where I was, so as to perform the invocation in it. It was not necessary for me to stay in one place during the ceremony; I frequently carried it out while riding or walking.[ … ] I had no difficulty in visualiz
ing the astral temple by an effort of will, and of course I was perfectly able to watch the results of the invocations with my astral eyes.

  Shortly after departing from Yunnanfu on March 2, Crowley decided to call a halt to further explorations into China, and instead to turn south toward Tonkin (in modern-day Vietnam). The China trek had come to be more wearing; relations with his Chinese porters had reached a nadir. On March 14, while Crowley was marching on ahead, one of the porters allegedly got into a squabble with Rose and struck the baby. Crowley was furious; when the party reached Manhao, on the Red River, two days later, he saw his chance for a strategically secure revenge. Crowley hired a dugout to transport his family, baggage, and his trusted servant Salama downriver south to Hokow:

  Having got everything aboard, I proceeded to pay the head man the exact sum due to him—less certain fines. Then the band played. They [the porters] started to threaten the crew and prevented them from casting off the ropes. They incited the bystanders to take their part; and presently we had thirty or forty yelling maniacs prepared to stone us. I got out my .400 Cordite Express and told Salama to wade ashore and untie the ropes. But like all Kashmiris, thoughtlessly brave in the face of elemental dangers, he was an absolute coward when opposed to men. I told him that unless he obeyed at once I would begin by shooting him. He saw I meant it and did his duty; while I covered the crowd with my rifle. Not a stone was thrown; three minutes later the fierce current had swept us away from the rioters.

  On March 18, they reached Hokow and “all got gloriously drunk celebrating the success of a journey which in the opinion of all reasonable people was a crazy escapade, doomed from the first to disaster.”

  They went on to Hanoi, the capital of Indochina, and took ship for Hong Kong on March 22. It was there that husband and wife parted company again. Crowley would return to England by the Pacific route to Japan, then to Canada and then, after a crossing of the entire North American continent, at last to sail for England from New York. Rose was to proceed by way of India (to pick up their remaining luggage) and then through the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. The rationale later offered by Crowley for this decision was his intention to drum up support in New York for a new Kanchenjunga expedition (which he would attempt, vainly, to accomplish). But it is doubtful if this was his primary reason. For Elaine Simpson (Soror Fidelis of the Golden Dawn), with whom he had been in astral contact in the autumn of 1905—prior to Rose’s arrival in India—now resided in Shanghai. And Shanghai was Crowley’s first port of call after shipping out from Hong Kong, on April 3, 1906, on the Nippon Maru.

  Crowley had long been deeply attracted to Simpson, despite their awkward encounter in 1902. He was also uncomfortable with the intensity of his feelings. In the Confessions, he stressed that Rose had been “an ideally perfect companion” during the China trek and that “I was absolutely in love with Rose in the ordinary sense of the term. My love for Fidelis excluded the material almost entirely. I was very proud of my love for Rose and very happy in it.” But in his diary of the time, Crowley chided himself for accepting the physical limitations of their present relationship—“it is the puritan A. C. who is wrong in not frankly wooing Elaine.” This intense sexual ambivalence was, however, integral to the magical workings they conducted in Shanghai during their two weeks together in April 1906. The basic goal was for the two of them to comb through the spiritual developments in Crowley’s life since the reception of The Book of the Law two years before.

  On April 18, they studied the Book together and Simpson told Crowley that she regarded it as a genuine revelation. Two days later, Crowley and Simpson together invoked Aiwass, the bestower of the Book. Aiwass now spoke out strongly against the chaste relations between Simpson and Crowley: “Yet I would wish you to love physically, to make perfect the circle of your union. [Simpson] will not do so, therefore she is useless. If she did, she would become useful.” Aiwass further warned that Crowley had made a mistake by making Simpson a full magical collaborator: “She is spiritually stronger than you. You should have dominated her by your superior strength on other planes.” Here, Aiwass seems to utter that which Crowley had concealed—that he wanted sex with Simpson, and that he feared her because he so respected her spiritual attainments—a respect unique in Crowley’s life as regarded female lovers. As for Rose (the “S.W.” or Scarlet Woman), Aiwass urged Crowley to return with Rose to Egypt: “Go with the S. W., this is essential: thus you shall get real power, that of God, the only one worth having.”

  The next day, April 21, Crowley left Shanghai to continue his voyage by way of Japan. His diary entry for April 22, on shipboard, dismissed the Shanghai invocations as a “morbid dream” and charged that Elaine’s magical powers, while considerable, had been “rotted up” because of her “clinging” to Crowley. “Having won me, let her now lose me! As for me I will go on as if I had never landed.” The challenge posed to Crowley’s relations—marital and magical—with wife Rose had been fended off. While Crowley and Simpson would conduct an intermittent correspondence for two decades more, their relationship was essentially at an end.

  Two days later, on April 24, at Kobe, Japan, Crowley wrote to Rose “with some reserve, of course utterly concealing” mention of either Simpson or the Shanghai invocations. This same day, he conducted an Augoeides Invocation and traveled astrally in his Body of Light. The results of the latter experiment were startling. Crowley found himself in a room in which a naked man was being nailed to a cruciform table. “Many venerable men sat around, feasting on his living flesh and quaffing his hot blood. These (I was told) were the adepts, whom I might one day join.” Crowley was asked by them what he would be willing to sacrifice on an altar which now appeared in a great hall. He was resolute—but also stubborn:

  I offered all save my will to know A[ugoeides] which I would only change for its own realization. I now became conscious of vast God-forms of Egypt sitting, so vast I could only see their knees. “Would not knowledge of the Gods suffice?” “No,” said I. It was then pointed out that I was being critical i.e. rationalistic and made to see that A[ugoeides] was not fashioned in my image. Necessarily, that is. I apologized, and knelt at altar, placing my hands on it, right over left. Then One human, white, self-shining (my idea after all) came forth and put his hands over mine, saying “I receive thee into the Order of the Silver Star.” Then, with advice to return, I sank back to earth in a cradle of flame.

  This astral encounter represented, for Crowley, his acceptance into the exalted Third Order—the realm, symbolically, of the highest kabbalistic sephiroth, the supernals (Binah, Chokmah, Kether); the realm, ontologically, of the Secret Chiefs themselves, the governing spirits of life on the planet Earth. But Crowley declined formally to grant himself, at this point, the grade of 8°=3□. Eight months later, in December 1906, the Secret Chiefs would again extend to Crowley—this time through Jones—a Third Order invitation. Again he would decline. It was 1909 before he would accept, “after having passed ceremonially through the Abyss in the fullest possible measure.” By the evidence of his writings in those intervening years, as well as his actions as the head of the A∴A∴, it is plain that—in essence, if not in title—Crowley felt himself one to whom the secrets of the Third Order had been revealed.

  During May, Crowley continued his daily practice of Augoeides Invocations while he crossed the North American continent from Vancouver to New York. He also toiled at a “Comment” upon the Book, as required of him by the Book. This “Comment,” which did not satisfy him, was ultimately published in 1912 in The Equinox. The North American journey proved no distraction, at any rate, leaving Crowley with nothing more vivid than an admiration for Niagara Falls. From New York, Crowley arrived in Liverpool on June 2, 1906.

  There, through waiting letters, he learned that his daughter Nuit, not yet two years of age, had died of typhoid in a hospital in Rangoon, en route to India with her mother. The cause, according to Crowley, was an improperly sanitized bottle nipple; for this neglect, Crowley blame
d Rose, who, he suspected, had failed to boil the nipple due to her drunkenness. A letter from Allan Bennett, who had learned of the baby’s death, described Rose’s desperate retreat into alcohol, in her hotel room, while the baby died in the hospital. Bennett suggested—out of concern for Rose’s capacities as a mother—that Crowley refrain from further sexual relations with her. This advice was, in any event, too late, for Rose was already pregnant again.

  The death of his daughter grieved Crowley. But it was a tendency of the man to make light of that which pained him most deeply, and so his account, in the Confessions, began with a joke made by his friend L. C. R. Duncombe Jewell, that Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley had died of “acute nomenclature.” “Cad,” was Crowley’s deadpan response, only then continuing: “In my ears rang that terrible cry of Macduff, ‘He has no children.’” Beyond this sense of personal loss, Crowley sought to place the death within the spiritual pattern of his life. He arrived at two major conclusions. The first was that the death had resulted from “the malice of the Abra-Melin demons,” which could have been warded off had he properly grasped the will of the Secret Chiefs. The second was that Rose, as Scarlet Woman, had failed in her function. In The Book of the Law, there was a warning verse: “Let the Scarlet Woman beware! If pity and compassion and tenderness visit her heart; if she leave my work to toy with old sweetnesses; then shall my vengeance be known. I will slay me her child [ … ]” [III, 43] In his 1912 commentary on this verse, Crowley averred that it had been “most terribly fulfilled, to the letter.”

  But Crowley’s sense of Rose’s failure as a Scarlet Woman was not immediate; when husband and wife reunited later in June, Crowley tried to persuade her to do magical work with him, even to pursue a Great Retirement together. Nothing came of this; perhaps her pregnancy posed a practical limitation. But both Rose and Crowley were shaken—to the point of illness—by lingering grief; a series of ailments (including an ulcerated throat) would plague Crowley through the remainder of 1906. He continued, with some lapses, his Augoeides Invocations. He also renewed a magical collaboration with George Cecil Jones, his old Golden Dawn mentor, who now again emerged as a needed ally. Crowley regarded Jones as an Adeptus Exemptus—equal to Crowley’s own highest acknowledged grade. In July 29, the two discussed the formation of a new magical order, as to which Jones readily ceded organizational leadership to Crowley himself. This order would become the A∴A∴.