Crowley had not been idle during the interim. The sculptor Jacob Epstein, with whom Crowley was acquainted, had just completed a controversial statue for the Parisian grave of Oscar Wilde which featured a bare penis. Crowley cared neither for Wilde nor for this particular work by Epstein. But the puritanical placement of a tarpaulin over the offending organ sparked his interest. He issued a press notice declaring that, on November 5, he would defiantly remove the tarpaulin. Crowley expected resistance from the authorities, but when he and two supporters arrived at the gravesite on the appointed morning, there was no one to oppose them. As he later wrote: “I made my speech and unveiled Epstein’s effort to the dull drizzling weather. It was a disheartening success.” But due to his prior notice, there was press coverage both in Paris and London. Epstein, however, took umbrage at these efforts on his behalf. In an indignant letter to the London Times, he stressed that “I do not consider any unofficial unveiling a compliment to me, though no doubt a jolly occasion for Mr. Crowley and his companions.” The Parisian authorities commissioned a bronze butterfly to be attached, in fig-leaf manner. Crowley, undaunted, paid a second, unpublicized visit to the grave:
I detached the butterfly and put it under my waistcoat. The gatekeeper did not notice how portly I had become. When I reached London, I put on evening dress and affixed the butterfly to my own person in the same way as previously to the statue, in the interests of modesty, and then marched into the Café Royal, to the delight of the assembled multitude. Epstein himself happened to be there and it was a glorious evening. By this time he had understood my motives, that I was honestly indignant at the outrage to him and determined to uphold the privileges of the artist.
This was Crowley’s first public foray since the Looking Glass trial, and it earned him a degree of respect in the London artistic circles which he alternately reviled and longed to enter.
After Crowley rejoined Desti on November 14, they traveled together to Zurich, en route to a winter vacation at St. Moritz. On the night of November 21, strange communications began that signaled a great magical working by the Beast and his new Scarlet Woman. We have only Crowley’s testimony as to what occurred, though Desti plainly manifested, by her devotion to the cause in the coming months, a conviction equal to if not greater than Crowley’s own. On that first night, she and Crowley had gotten drunk and made passionate love. Around midnight, Crowley fell asleep, but was soon awakened by Desti—or Soror Virakam, as she may be called from this point, as Desti would shortly thereafter take Virakam (an amalgam of the Sanskrit for vir, man or strength, and kama, lust) as her magical name when Crowley initiated her as a Probationer in the A∴A∴. That night, Desti was, according to Crowley, “apparently seized with a violent attack of hysteria, in which she poured forth a frantic torrent of senseless hallucination.” Crowley was at first skeptical, but soon recognized his own “language of symbols” in Desti’s hurried words and sensed the onset of something akin to Cairo in April 1904—a contact from a higher, or at least other, intelligence.
There was an entity wishing to speak to Crowley—Desti envisioned him now (as she had, in a sleeping state, in a premonitory dream the night before) as “an old man with a long white beard” whose appurtenances included a magical wand. His name, as given to Desti, was “Abuldiz.” This Abuldiz, communicating through Desti’s voice, instructed Crowley—by his Golden Dawn Neophyte name of Frater Perdurabo—as follows: “Here is a book to be given to Fra. P. The name of the book is Aba, and its number IV.” Aba is Hebrew for “father”; it is also sometimes used as an epithet for God; the kabbalistic numerical value of its letters is four. The book Aba would ultimately be renamed by Crowley as Book Four.
What Crowley would come to call the Abuldiz Working was a series of seven extended dialogues between Perdurabo and Abuldiz, with Virakam as the speaking and envisioning medium or “Seer.” These dialogues occurred in an irregular sequence of evenings beginning on November 21 and concluding on December 19, 1911. Crowley made a transcript of the proceedings. It is an unrewarding document to quote at any length, as the bulk of its text consists of muddled and inconsequential attempts by Abuldiz and Crowley to communicate. Abuldiz did not care for Crowley’s tone of cross-examination, while Crowley was frustrated by the vagueness of the communications issued by this unbidden disincarnate intelligence. All sessions were conducted in the late evening and typically extended well past midnight. Virakam, as Seer, began at least some sessions in an altered state—postcoitally satiated, or drunk from alcohol, a drug which Abuldiz had assured Crowley would be suitable. At times Virakam felt exalted by the proceedings; at other times she would panic, even come close to tears.
But Crowley was not spared certain psychological ordeals of his own. For Abuldiz was tantalizingly elusive, neither confirming nor denying—in response to a direct question by Crowley—Crowley’s status as Logos of the Aeon. The diffidence of Abuldiz could drive Crowley to distraction, as in this December 4 exchange:
P[erdurabo]: How shall I get this Book IV?
A[b-ul-diz]: Waiting in London.
P[erdurabo]: I don’t want the rational answer I want the absurd.
At last it became sufficiently clear that Crowley and Desti were to go off to Italy and find a suitable villa to rent, so that the dictation of Book Four—a basic guide to the practices of yoga and magic—could proceed undisturbed. Just where in Italy had been left vague by Abuldiz, but Rome was chosen as a suitable starting point. There remained, however, a delicate matter to resolve. Desti’s thirteen-year-old son, enrolled in a boarding school in Normandy, was due to join them during his Christmas vacation. The arrival of young Preston did not please Crowley, who found the boy “a most god-forsaken lout.” That boy—who would grow up to be Preston Sturges, one of the most gifted comedic directors (The Great McGinty, Sullivan’s Travels, Miracle at Morgan’s Creek) in the history of Hollywood—liked Crowley even less. In his autobiography, Sturges inveighed against his mother’s lover with inspired, though not strictly factual, venom:
The practitioner and staunch defender of every form of vice historically known to man, generally accepted as one of the most depraved, vicious, and revolting humbugs who ever escaped from a nightmare or a lunatic asylum, universally despised and enthusiastically expelled from every country he ever tried to live in, Mr. Crowley nevertheless was considered by my mother to be not only the epitome of charm and good manners, but also the possessor of one of the very few genius-bathed brains she had been privileged to observe at work during her entire lifetime. Ask me not why!
It was January 1912 when the magical lovers and the disgruntled son settled into their temporary home—the Villa Caldarazzo, in Posilippo, on the southern outskirts of Naples. This locale had been discovered one day on a driving tour, by a sudden burst of inspiration by Desti, who directed their driver to take an overgrown side road off the main highway which led to an old villa under repair. Crowley was impressed by the fact that, by kabbalistic gematria, Villa Caldarazzo added to 418, the number of the Great Work and of Abrahadabra, the Magical Word of the new Aeon. Young Preston, unsurprisingly, was of a different opinion—“apart from its supernatural features, it had little to recommend it. It was cold and damp, few of its windows closed properly, it was completely inaccessible and the plumbing leaked.”
The procedure—agreed upon by Crowley and Desti, rather than expressly ordered by Abuldiz—called for Crowley to dictate to Desti, who acted as amanuensis. Preston, an onlooker, was repulsed by the Beast’s new hairstyle: “Mr. Crowley had his entire skull shaved except for one small tufted square in the exact middle of this cranium. On this lawn, or village green, he promenaded his fingers as if they were dogs one had taken out to water.” Still more rankling for him was to observe Crowley in his role of spiritual teacher to his mother. Crowley was at this time employing techniques set down in Liber Jugorum (discussed in Chapter Three) designed to reduce the conditioned states of the mind. One such technique was to cut one’s own arm each time one violated c
ertain conditions of mental discipline. Crowley dryly remarked, in Book Four, that Liber Jugorum was “one of the most hilariously exciting parlour games for the family circle ever invented.” It is thus safe to assume that Crowley was aware of the impression he was creating in the mind of young Preston, who would recall:
[Crowley’s] repugnant reaction each time my poor mother had so far forgotten his teachings as to utter in his hearing a singular personal pronoun like “I” or “me” or “mine.” The instant his ears were so assaulted, he solemnly withdrew an open penknife from his robe, raised his arm so the loose sleeve of his robe fell back to expose his bare forearm, and then with the penknife slashed a small fresh slice under the ladder of slices he had already incised into his forearm [ … ]
Reading about some of his subsequent exploits, I realize that my mother and I were lucky to escape with our lives. If I had been a little older, he might not have escaped with his.
Only after he had returned to his boarding school did Preston learn that, during this very January, his mother had filed for a divorce from his adoptive father, Solomon Sturges, who had given the boy his name.
As the winter of 1912 proceeded, Desti and Crowley fell to quarreling. Desti returned to Paris where—after a brief rapprochement with a pursuing Crowley, she married Veli Bey, a Turkish man whom Crowley believed to be a fortune hunter. This marriage endured; but surprisingly, Crowley and Desti managed to remain friends, with Desti serving as an editor for the final numbers of The Equinox through 1913. Crowley was always gracious to her in his later writings, blaming his own skepticism for driving her away from her role as Scarlet Woman.
As for their finished collaborative effort, Book Four stands as one of the most significant works ever issued by Crowley. It was published by Crowley in late 1912 or early 1913 in the physical form of a square (four equal sides) at a price of four groats (one shilling). Part I is dedicated to meditation, which Crowley equated with the practice of yoga. In essence, this Part I is a fleshed-out version of the notebooks kept by Crowley during his yogic studies under Allan Bennett in Ceylon in 1902. Part II is devoted to the fundamentals of ceremonial magic. Here, Crowley emerges as an esoteric modernist, exhorting the reader to magical endeavor in brisk prose on the grounds of common sense and practical psychology—a radical break from the veiled, sanctimonious tone that had dominated writings on magic since the Romantic period. Crowley followed the basic approach set forth in his 1903 essay “An Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic” (discussed in Chapter Three). That is, he argued for magic as a structured, empirical means for developing unrecognized capacities of the mind. The implements and rituals of magic were extensions or projections of mind, which—however apparently irrational—constituted a course of self-confirming initiation to the open-minded and dedicated practitioner. Most fundamental of all was the training of the Magical Will, through which yogic meditation became possible. Magic was thus linked to yoga as an advisable preliminary discipline; but Crowley also stressed that magic was a full equivalent to yoga and other forms of mysticism, itself sufficient to attain the Great Work, which is clinically defined as “an occurrence in the brain characterized essentially by the unity of subject and object.”
In Book Four, for the first time, Crowley switched from “magic” to the older spelling of “magick” so as “to distinguish the Science of the Magi from all its counterfeits.” The teachings of The Book of the Law are interspersed lightly, most often in footnotes. This is due in part to the status of this work as a beginner’s text; but it also reflected a tension between Crowley’s ambitions as a Prophet and his heterodox approach to spiritual practice (as expressed in an opening note by Desti, who was accorded coauthor status by Crowley):
Frater Perdurabo is the most honest of all the great religious teachers. Others have said, “Believe me!” He says: “Don’t believe me!” He does not ask for followers; would despise and refuse them. He wants an independent and self-reliant body of students to follow out their own methods of research.[ … ]
The whole life of Frater Perdurabo is now devoted to seeing that you obtain this living experience of Truth for, by, and in yourselves!
Crowley never came to “despise and refuse” disciples—he tried to put all comers to use in some manner. But his belief in the value of independent practice by students was sincere, and he adhered to it to the end of his life.
Book Four is not without serious and even gratuitous flaws. It was of the essence of Crowley’s narrative method to defy moral expectations, even as he courted the reader’s admiration for his gentlemanly honor. As previously discussed (in Chapter Three), Crowley’s analysis of two of the “limbs” of yogic practice—yama (moral restraint) and niyama (right action)—displays a naive, if not hubristic, faith in the power of inexperienced students to adequately assess and control their multifold earthly desires. In his Preliminary Remarks, Crowley inserted a vile repetition—gratuitously out of context—of the fraudulent “blood libel” charges of ritual murder made against the Jews of Eastern Europe. Blatant bigotry is a persistent minor element in Crowley’s writings. He was aware of this, but regarded his bigotry as a kind of secondary excrescence that readers could take or leave as they liked, without undue concern; as he put it in the Confessions, “my spiritual apprehension of truth represents my real self, while my intellectual perceptions are necessarily coloured by my nationality, caste, education and personal predilection.” This, of course, corresponded to his analysis of the moral content of the “limbs” of yoga: Crowley refused to allow that his personal views or behavior, however indefensible even by his own gentlemanly code of honor, could affect the value of his higher spiritual insights—which were, kabbalistically speaking, on different planes. This will be most unconvincing to readers who would hold, as a criterion of the attainments Crowley claimed, a more harmonious interweaving of all planes. Book Four is flawed by these failings, as are, in a similar manner, certain poems of Pound and Eliot. Nevertheless, it deserves to be recognized as a text of value both for scholars and practitioners in the fields of yoga and magic.
Crowley did not himself make the claim, but it could be argued that, in the opening months of 1912, he enjoyed the finest sustained stint of writing of his life. In addition to Book Four, Crowley also wrote a singular essay, “Energized Enthusiasm” (his first plainspoken effort to link—on a theoretical basis—sexuality and spirituality) and completed a volume of compressed brilliance, The Book of Lies (1913)—his greatest success in merging his talents as poet, scholar, and magus. The Book of Lies stands as a unique literary and philosophical delight for readers with the patience and wit to puzzle out its tiered paradoxes. There are 93 chapters in Lies, as 93 is the number of Thelema (Will) and Agape (Love), two key terms of The Book of the Law. The first two chapters are facing pages displaying only “?” and “!”, the symbols explicated in his essay “The Soldier and the Hunchback” as representing the oscillating processes of doubt and insight. The remaining chapters, numbered 1 through 91, reflect to some degree the kabbalistic significance of each such number; in 1921, Crowley wrote a Commentary to Lies, included in all subsequent editions, which provided hints (and sometimes deliberate blinds) to aid and abet multiple and even contradictory interpretations.
The dominant style employed in Lies is that of the ironic prose poem. Crowley was deeply influenced, during this period, by the prose poems of Baudelaire, which he translated in 1913 (these translations were ultimately privately published in 1928). The Baudelarian stance of sensuous immersion and spiritual defiance—blended with Crowley’s theurgic mysticism—shows itself in Chapter 34 of Lies, entitled “The Smoking Dog”:
Each act of man is the twist and double of an hare.
Love and Death are the greyhounds that course him.
God bred the hounds and taketh His pleasure in the sport.
This is the Comedy of Pan, that man should think he
hunteth, while those hounds hunt him.
This is the Tragedy of Man
when facing Love and Death
he turns to bay. He is no more hare, but boar.
There are no other comedies or tragedies.
Cease then to be the mockery of God; in savagery of love
and death live thou and die!
Thus shall His laughter be thrilled through with Ecstasy.
“The Smoking Dog” is a reference to a then popular item of bric-a-brac, a figurine dog with tiny surrogate cigarettes that could be fitted into its mouth and then lit to produce the appearance of a canine smoking. It is a symbol of an animal both unnatural and ridiculous in its actions—as humans appear to the gods when they deny their essential natures. The number 34 can refer kabbalistically to the laugher of Pan, the god form of earthly ecstasy and delight.
Several of the chapters in Lies were written in a pedagogical style. Despite the public buckling of the A∴A∴, Crowley was still eager for new students. In the summer of 1912, he immersed himself in an altogether different magical organization, the Ordo Templi Orientis (Ancient Order of Oriental Templars), or O.T.O. Crowley being Crowley, his governing aim was to remake the O.T.O. in the image of Thelema. In this aim, he was assisted by an exceedingly strange, if not impossible, series of events.
It was in May 1912 that Crowley, living again in London at the new address of 33 Avenue Studios, Fulham, received an unexpected visit from Theodor Reuss. Reuss now made the startling accusation that Crowley had violated the honor of the O.T.O. by openly publishing its greatest secret in The Book of Lies. Crowley protested both his innocence and his ignorance as to what this great secret was. Reuss then pulled from Crowley’s bookshelf a copy of Lies and showed the offending passage to its author, who was at once transformed: “It instantly flashed upon me. The entire symbolism not only of free masonry but of many other traditions, blazed upon my spiritual vision. From that moment the O.T.O. assumed its proper importance in my mind. I understood that I held in my hands the key to the future progress of humanity.”
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