Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  In late summer, Rose gave birth to a daughter, Lola Zaza. Rose had been drinking during her pregnancy, which surely contributed to the frail health of the new baby. According to Crowley, “it lay almost lifeless for more than three days and at three weeks old nearly died of bronchitis.” Even before the arrival of a physician, Crowley had provided for oxygen to be on hand, and believed that this precaution saved the baby’s life. He was fiercely proud of his paternal efforts during this crisis, although, in the Confessions, little tenderness shows through: “I fought like a fiend against death.[ … ] So Lola Zaza lives today. May her life prove worth the pains I took to preserve it.” As in the case of the death of Nuit, his deeper emotions were concealed from his public autobiography. But in his private Augoeides practice, Crowley devised a special ritual of thanksgiving for the birth of Lola Zaza.

  In September, Crowley and Jones reconstructed the Golden Dawn Neophyte Ritual with the aim, as Crowley viewed it, of “eliminating all unnecessary features and quintessentializing the magical formulae.” There was a distinct continuity between the teachings of the Golden Dawn and the rituals crafted by Crowley for his A∴A∴, as Crowley himself recognized—albeit giving his own order (termed here the “Silver Star”) the place of honor in his mystical poem “Aha!” (written in 1909):

  Master, how subtly hast thou drawn

  The daylight from the Golden Dawn,

  Bidden the Cavernous Mount unfold

  Its Ruby Rose, its Cross of Gold;

  Until I saw, flashed from afar,

  The Hawk’s Eye in the Silver Star!

  On his own, Crowley kept up his Augoeides Invocations, in which he frequently made use of hashish as a stimulating ingredient. While his diary reflects this, Crowley made no mention of hashish in his later accounts of this period in the Temple of Solomon the King and in the Confessions. It would seem that he saw it as a distracting or unworthy element. But another essay, “The Psychology of Hashish” (1909) provided—albeit in an oblique manner—an account of the role of hashish on the night of October 9, 1906, when Crowley felt himself at last (after some thirty-four weeks) to have completed the Abra-Melin Operation and to have attained the Knowledge of the Augoeides, his Holy Guardian Angel. All of Crowley’s written accounts have been consulted for the discussion that follows.

  In the Sanskrit language of Hindu yoga, Crowley termed his experience that night an “Atmadarshana” or “Vision of the Universal Peacock” in which there is “a consciousness of the entire Universe as One, and as All, in Its necessary relation to Itself in and out of Time and Space.” This Atmadarshana was soon supplanted by a “Shivadarshana,” or “Vision of the Destruction of the Universe, the Opening of the Eye of Shiva” which destroys the split consciousness of self and other. In Hindu mythology, the opening of the eye of Shiva leads to the fiery conflagration of the universe, a metaphor Crowley used to describe his October 9 attainment in “Aha!”:

  [ … ] The great sight

  Of the intolerable light

  Of the whole universe that wove

  The labyrinth of light and love,

  Blazed in me. Then some giant will,

  Mine or another’s, thrust a thrill

  Through the great vision. All the light

  Went out in an immortal night,

  The world annihilated by

  The opening of the Master’s Eye.

  How can I tell it?

  On that night, Crowley had conducted a new ritual of his own devising, the purpose of which was to thank the gods and offer sacrifice for the benefit of his daughter, Lola Zaza. At 8 P.M., Crowley ingested some hashish, which by 10 P.M. was having an active effect. The next day, his diary entry was triumphant: “I am still drunk with Samadhi all day.” But a degree of hesitancy showed itself, even as he strove to banish his own doubt:

  Remember how close to Samadhi the ritual brought me: perhaps even the control of the drug that arose and forced me to bed, plus my fear of the shock of R[ose]’s anticipated coming up to bed, operated to stop me. For in the “Thanksgiving and sacrifice for S.D. [Lola Zaza]” I did get rid of everything but the Holy Exalted One, and must have held him for a minute or two. I did. I am sure that I did. I expected Rose to see a halo round my head.

  But the hashish enthusiasm surged up against the ritual-enthusiasm; so I hardly know which phenomena to attribute to which.

  The question of the interplay between hashish and Samadhi continued to occupy Crowley. He discussed the matter with Jones, who opined that the hashish had nothing to do with it, though it was perhaps useful as a “starter.” On October 31, Crowley again conducted an Augoeides Invocation after smoking hashish cigarettes, though a smaller dosage than previously. It was past 10 P.M. when he commenced the ritual, invoking “nearly twice” and suffering “terrible agony.” “Once again I nearly got there—all went brilliance—but not quite. I had too much drug and too little invocation. I completely forgot L[ola] thanksgiving altogether.”

  In December, Crowley continued his work on the esoteric compendium 777, as well as his intensive communications with Jones. Crowley had, by this point—given his difficulties with Rose, and his lack of desire to participate in the day-to-day realities of raising a child—no settled residence, spending time alternately in London, East-borne, and Bournemouth. But experimentation continued with hashish and the Augoeides Invocations. On December 27, Crowley ingested some two grams of hashish and subsequently stayed up through the night, transcribing, in his diary, rough notes of an Atmadarshana experience:

  The ‘millions of worlds’ game—the peacock multiform with each ‘eye’ of its fan a mirror of glory wherein also another peacock—everything thus. (Here consciousness has no longer any knowledge of normal impression. Each thought is itself visualized as a World-Peacock—such seems to me the interpretation of above.) 1.20 A.M. Head still buzzing: wrote above. Samadhi is Hashish, an ye will; but Hashish is not Samadhi (It’s a low form this Atmadarshana.) (I don’t, and didn’t, quite understand this. I think it means that only an Adept can use Hashish to excite Samadhi; or else that Hashish is the evil and averse S.) [“S.” likely signifies Samadhi in its negative aspect as base delusion.]

  In “The Psychology of Hashish,” written some two years later, Crowley sought to resolve this inner debate as to the relationship between drug intoxication and mystical states. The outcome was necessarily influenced by the express approval, in The Book of the Law, of drug use for ecstatic worship of its gods. Significantly, however, in “The Psychology of Hashish” Crowley makes no reference whatsoever to the Book. His goal was to examine the mental effects of the drug and its potential use to the interested scientist or mystic—whose linked quest was here termed “Scientific Illuminism.” To skeptics who dismissed mysticism as inherently subjective, Crowley posed the analogy of bacteria, the existence of which was not credited until the invention of the microscope. Hashish, he argued, could serve in like manner as a perceptual entrance to mysticism, the reality of which could be established empirically: “Hashish at least gives proof of a new order of consciousness, and (it seems to me) it is this prima facie case that mystics have always needed to make out, and never have made out.” (A similar argument was put forward by Aldous Huxley in his famous study, The Doors of Perception (1954).)

  As we have seen, Crowley—for all his training in yoga—found it difficult to separate the experience of Samadhi from the influence of hashish. He did assert, in “The Psychology of Hashish,” that his travels in India had taught him that “many of the lesser Yogis employed hashish (whether vainly or no we shall discuss later) to obtain Samadhi.” But what, at last, was the verdict of this essay as to the role of the drug in his October 9 experience? Ironically, Crowley adopted the fatalistic teaching of his old friend Ananda Metteyya: One’s attainment is predestined by karma—the turning wheel of existence. Crowley, who believed his own place to have been most fortunate, thus relegated hashish to a tangential role in his attainment of Samadhi: “One may doubt whether the drug al
one ever does this. It is perhaps only the destined adept who, momentarily freed by the dissolving action of the drug from the chain of the four lower Skandhas [Buddhist term for the chains of phenomenal existence—name, form, sensation, and perception], obtains this knowledge which is his by right, totally inept as he may be to do so by any ordinary methods.”

  Even so, the fact of hashish having been a part of his October 1906 experience seems to have displeased Crowley, or at least to have embarrassed him. “The Psychology of Hashish” makes no explicit reference to the October 1906 Samadhi (though the reader familiar with the facts of Crowley’s life is invited to see the connection). In the Confessions, Crowley was again cautious and oblique, referring to experiments with hashish after his return from China which had been “unexpectedly successful” and pointed to “a striking analogy between this toxic excitement and the more legitimate methods of mental development.” The reference to “more legitimate methods” is telling.

  Crowley’s discomfort here is further evidenced by John St. John (1909), a published diary account of a Magical Retirement in Paris in October 1908 that will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter. Therein, Crowley argued that he could spur attainment of Adonai (a designation for his Holy Guardian Angel) through hashish “and the truth of it would have been 5 per cent. drug and 95 per cent. magic; but nobody would have believed me. Remember that this record is for the British Public, ‘who may like me yet.’” Crowley went on to reject any real hope of acceptance by his countrymen, but the relevant point was made: He feared public reaction to his use of hashish in this context. But then, Crowley shared the very ambivalence he attributed to the British public. Consider this subsequent John St. John entry, pointedly sarcastic in tone: “There are only two more idiocies to perform—one, to take a big dose of Hashish and record the ravings as if they were Samadhi; and two, to go to church. I may as well give up.” Still later, while drinking in a Parisian cafe, Crowley rebuked himself for taking mere intoxication seriously: “He has drunk only about one third of his half-bottle of light white wine; yet he’s like a hashish-drunkard, only more so. The loss of the time-sense which occurs with hashish he got during his experiments with that drug in 1906, but in an unimportant way. (Damn him! he is so glad. He calls this a Result. A result! Damn him!)”

  Through all the exaltation and confusion of October 1906, Jones had served as a needed touchstone. But another friendship emerged during this same period that would ultimately prove more influential in fueling Crowley’s sense of himself as a worthy public teacher. This new friend was Captain John Frederick Charles Fuller, who would ultimately rise to the rank of major general in the British Army. Fuller is widely acknowledged as one of the premier military theorists of all time. One of his few peers in this field, Captain Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart, pronounced that Fuller was “a true example of genius, a term often misapplied.” Among Fuller’s major achievements was the first modern conception—fully substantiated by the horrors of World War Two—of the potential and use of highly mobile armored tanks. Fuller also emerged as an early champion of the then controversial viewpoint—today regarded as a truism—that a flourishing peacetime industrial capacity was a prime requisite of success in protracted warfare; as one of Fuller’s favorite maxims went, “The tools of peace are the weapons of war.” Fuller, an arrogant man with a waspish wit who was disliked or ignored by the majority of the British high command, earned the nickname “Boney” for his persistent adulation of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had declared that he would “master the world by will alone.” Fuller retired from the army in frustration in 1933, shortly thereafter joining the British Union of Fascists. He was one of only two Englishmen invited by Adolf Hitler—an admirer of Fuller’s tactical writings—to the Führer’s 50th birthday party in April 1939. Fuller died in 1966, having devoted his later years to the writing of history. This preamble on his life achievements enables one to appreciate the signal fact that, in a formative stage of his development, Fuller came to regard Aleister Crowley as a poetic and magical genius of the highest order. Fuller devoted himself for some four years—before breaking with Crowley irrevocably—to the New Aeon.

  Fuller, three years Crowley’s junior, had followed a somewhat parallel path in his childhood. Fuller’s father was an Anglican cleric who had imposed a thoroughly Christian education on his son which did not take. Fuller graduated from Sandhurst, the Royal Military College, and then served in the Boer War before being stationed in India. There, as had Crowley, Fuller studied under a native tutor, or munshi, and met with numerous yogis and religious teachers. By 1905, Fuller—by then an ardent Social Darwinist—had published essays in the Agnostic Journal, a most unusual sideline pursuit for a British officer. In that same year, Fuller came on a copy of Crowley’s privately issued verse satire Why Jesus Wept. Inserted in the book was a tongue-in-cheek leaflet written by Crowley to promote the sale of his forthcoming Collected Works:

  The Chance of the Year!

  The Chance of the Century!!

  The Chance of the Geologic Period!!!

  The chance offered was an essay competition on—what else?—the Collected Works. The cash prize offered to the winner was £100. Fuller proved to be the only entrant. The two men ultimately met in August 1906, and Fuller quickly befriended both Crowley and Jones. Fuller’s essay was published in book form as The Star in the West (1907). The £100 prize was never paid, but Fuller never objected.

  Fuller accepted the phallocentric aspect of Crowley’s teachings, but he was not comfortable with homosexuality. In 1906, Fuller had married Margarethe Karnatz, a beautiful woman who left intellectual matters to her husband while fiercely guarding his privacy. In Star, Fuller insisted that “if it be necessary for the initiate to gaze on the back parts of Jahveh, it is, however, most certainly not necessary for him to kiss the hind quarters of the goat of Mendes [a homoerotic magical ritual attributed to the medieval Knights Templar] or to revel in the secret orgies of the Agapae [a Gnostic sect]; for the tempting of man is but the tempering of the metal.” But Fuller steadfastly defended free choice: “Yet the virtue of one man may be the vice of another.” As to his own code of conduct, however, Fuller would have regarded an allegation of homosexuality as an insult to his honor. Here lay the seed of the quarrel that would—four years later—end his friendship with Crowley.

  But for the remaining years of the decade, their alliance was unshakeable. By 1907, Fuller had joined the A∴A∴ with the magical name Per Ardua Ad Astra (Through Effort to the Stars) and was practicing astral travel and other rituals under Crowley’s tutelage. Crowley was, by this time, living essentially a “single” life in London, having taken a flat of his own so as to get away from Rose, whose excessive drinking had palled his joy in marriage. In effect, Crowley now left the care of Lola Zaza to a woman whom he regarded as an unfit mother. He took female lovers during this period, two of whom, Ada Leverson and Vera Snepp, he celebrated in poems included in Clouds Without Water, a volume of erotomystical verse he would issue privately in 1909. As with White Stains and The Scented Garden of Abdullah, Crowley devised a pseudonymous editor for the volume—in this case, the Reverend C. Verey, who, in his pious preface, warned readers against the blasphemies contained therein: “Unblushing, the old Serpent rears its crest to the sky; unashamed, the Beast and the Scarlet Woman chant the blasphemous litanies of their fornication.” For Crowley, the fires of the spirit were banked by surrender to erotic impulse. Such was the role of the women Crowley celebrated in Clouds, which forms, in this respect, a heterosexual counterpart to The Scented Garden.

  The central female character in Clouds, with whom the poet experiences the heights and depths of eros and spirit, is named Lola (the nickname of Vera Snepp). There is, amid considerable stretches of straining and mediocre verse, some startlingly original imagery in Clouds, as in this paean to Lola:

  Our love is like a glittering sabre bloodied

  With lives of men; upsoared the sudden sun;

  The chor
al heaven woke; the aethyr flooded

  All space with joy that you and I were one.

  From the evidence of Clouds, Crowley had, by 1907, utterly abandoned the trappings of a monogamous marriage. As a regular stop in his new London life, Crowley frequented a chemist’s shop on Stafford Street run by one E. P. Whineray, a man of broad knowledge of the properties of chemical agents (he would later contribute an essay on hashish to The Equinox) and of the secret doings of London life. Whineray managed the task of filling Crowley’s various needs for drugs (recall that hashish and like intoxicants were still legal in England) and for ingredients for incense admixtures, such as the rare onycha required for the incense sacred to Tetragrammaton (the four-lettered name of the Hebrew god). It was Whineray who introduced Crowley to the Earl of Tankerville, thus setting into play a remarkable case study of an ill-fitted pupil driven to distraction by an ill-suited teacher.

  Crowley frequently acknowledged his indebtedness to classical Sufi teachings. A fundamental tenet therein is that students may receive instruction only if they are in fact suited to do so, and then only at the right time, in the right place, and with the right conjunction of persons. But Crowley was not one to turn away a potential disciple. The Earl of Tankerville, by Crowley’s own account, suffered from crippling paranoia, excessive brandy consumption, and cocaine addiction. Crowley at once undertook to remake him through rigorous magical training.