Once arrived in Moscow, Crowley was entranced by the beauty of the city and afire with the urge to write poetry and ritual. A key factor here was his discovery, within a few days, of an erotic muse of formidable power. Crowley’s affair with Waddell had either diminished to low ebb, or was swept into the background with the onset of this new love, as rapturously described in the Confessions:
In a cafe, I met a young Hungarian girl named Anny Ringler; tall, tense, lean as a starving leopardess with wild insatiable eyes and a long straight thin mouth, a scarlet scar which seemed to ache with the anguish of hunger for some satisfaction beyond earth’s power to supply. We came together with irresistible magnetism. We could not converse in human language. I had forgotten nearly all my Russian; and her German was confined to a few broken cries. But we had no need of speech. The love between us was ineffably intense. It still inflames my inmost spirit. She had passed beyond the region where pleasure had meaning for her. She could only feel through pain, and my own means of making her happy was to inflict physical cruelties as she directed. The kind of relation was altogether new to me; and it was because of this, intensified as it was by the environment of the self-torturing soul of Russia, that I became inspired to create by the next six weeks.
Ringler fit a powerful erotic type for Crowley, with her lean frame, intense eyes, and broad, thin lips. (Recall the whore with “insatiable intensity of passion that blazed from her evil inscrutable eyes” in Mexico City in 1900, who inspired Tannhäuser.) In defense of the sexual dynamics of this affair, Crowley argued along libertarian lines that many modern readers will acknowledge: “Terms such as ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ have no valid application in a loving sexual encounter in which pain is a voluntarily given and received medium of genuine pleasure: The proof of the pudding is in the eating; my relations with Anny must be judged by their fruits; happiness, inspiration, spirituality, and romantic idealism.”
The pattern of Crowley’s days in Moscow was to see Anny for an hour or so, and then to wander about and find a suitable place to write. He produced two long poems, “The Fun of the Fair,” which described Crowley’s visit to the rural fair (made famous by Gogol) at Nijni Novgorod, and “The City of God,” a rhapsodic lyric to Moscow which Crowley published in the English Review. (These poems were later issued by the O.T.O., as separate volumes, in 1942 and 1943, respectively.) But the two most memorable works of this summer were the “Hymn to Pan” and the “Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae,” commonly termed the Gnostic Mass.
“Hymn to Pan,” which was read at Crowley’s funeral thirty-four years later, is perhaps his most rhetorically riveting, and emotionally unsettling, magical lyric. The “Hymn” was not intended by Crowley as a call to sexual violence, but it does utilize images of such violence to convey—in its final lines—the union of humankind and the fertility god. The refrain “Io Pan” is borrowed from the Greek classical tradition:
And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend
Everlasting, world without end,
Mannikin, maiden, maenad, man,
In the might of Pan.
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan!
The Gnostic Mass, a formal, choreographed ritual with multiple speaking roles, was composed by Crowley with the express purpose—as indicated by its full Latin title—of providing for the O.T.O. a ceremony that paralleled the Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic Mass. In the Gnostic Mass, semen and menses—which may be transformed into physico-spiritual essences (the Great Work or Summum Bonum) by those in possession of the secret—are symbolized by the Priest (who bears the “Sacred Lance”) and the Priestess (who should be “actually Virgo Intacta, or specially dedicated to the Service of the Great Order”). These two partake of the sacred Cake of Light and Cup of Wine. During the ritual, the Priest parts a sacred veil with his Lance and embraces the knees of the Priestess, who has removed her robes to embody the sacred nakedness of the goddess Nuit in The Book of the Law. Crowley conceded, in the instructions, that by the time of the embrace the Priestess could again have dressed herself “if necessary, as in savage countries”—an allusion to puritan England. But Crowley himself exercised voluntary restraint in this regard. As his friend Gerald Yorke later explained, “Crowley was a complete hedonist in that he used wine, drugs and sex in all its forms. But he did so in privacy. There is no recorded instance of more than two others being present when he worked or worshipped in this way. When he celebrated the Gnostic Mass in company he always used a stage property lance and both the Priestess and her two child acolytes were decorously clad.” The Gnostic Mass continues, to this day, to be performed on a weekly basis by O.T.O. groups around the world. It has also earned a place in literature by virtue of its having been drawn from by James Branch Cabell in his classic fantasy novel Jurgen (1919). Crowley subsequently sought, through correspondence, to win over Cabell to Thelema. This effort was futile. Cabell later dismissed Crowley as amongst the “hordes of idiots and prurient fools” who dabbled in black magic.
Crowley and his Ragged Ragtime Girls returned to London in the autumn of 1913. The Beast now oversaw—in his fifth year of editorship—the tenth and final number of volume one of The Equinox. Completing the volume had been a formidable task, and a financially draining one. Crowley duly announced, in this final number, that the second volume of The Equinox—spanning the five years to come—would be a volume of “silence.”
By late December, in Paris, Crowley decided upon his immediate future course: He would concentrate on his own spiritual progress (held in abeyance by his public efforts as teacher) through active experimentation in sexual magic. To understand Crowley, one must be willing to grant his sincerity here. To regard his magic as merely an elaborate disguise for lust is unjust; if Crowley had wanted sex and sex alone, he could have had it.
The partner chosen by Crowley for his first major experiment—which he named the Paris Working—was Neuburg. They would devote some seven weeks to the task—a total of twenty-four ritual workings, which varied widely in intensity and effect. Not even Crowley could term the Paris Working a complete success. But one result, at least, emerged clearly: he would henceforth devote himself primarily to sexual, as opposed to ceremonial, magic.
One might wonder, given Crowley’s own professed lack of detailed knowledge, how the great experiment was to proceed. According to Jean Overton Fuller, Neuburg later recalled that “they made up a ritual along the lines of those they imagined to have been practiced in antiquity, and that the chief clues they had came through Roman texts though they believed the traditions they glimpsed went back to an antiquity far more remote, and to a culture which seemed to have been more general to the countries round the Mediterranean basin.” The sense of such a tradition was evident in the Paris Working—on two occasions, Crowley and Neuburg experienced reincarnative visions in ancient Mediterranean settings.
The first of the Paris Working rituals took place on New Year’s Eve, 1914. The initial magical act, which took place in the late afternoon, had Crowley “confess” himself and receive “the Sacrament from a certain priest A.B.” A.B. was Walter Duranty, the New York Times foreign correspondent who, as earlier mentioned, had been Crowley’s lover and also shared with Crowley the attentions of Jane Chéron, whom Duranty later married. The “Sacrament” received from Duranty was semen; the means of reception was not specified in the record. Semen and blood were the two primary essences—at once physical and symbolic—of the Paris Working; both served as quintessential fluids of life energy.
The banishing ritual of the pentagram, employed to purify the room, was now performed by Neuburg in the form of a dance that merged into an invocation—written by Crowley—of the two Roman gods central to the Paris Working, Mercury and Jupiter. Mercury, as the god of wisdom and the messenger who bridged the divine and human realms, could guide the quest for the secrets of sexual magic. Jupiter, as the spirit of wise, prosperous, and generous rule, could aid Crowley both in establishing Thelema and in replenishing hi
s finances. While dancing, Neuburg was ritually scourged on the buttocks by Crowley, who further employed a dagger to cut a cross (almost certainly a light tracing on the skin) on Neuburg’s chest; a chain was also bound over Neuburg’s forehead.
At midnight of the New Year, the second stage commenced. Crowley and Neuburg engaged in ritual sex, reciting, as they did so, a Latin verse composed by Duranty and Crowley to focus the consciousness of the two participants:
Jungitur in vati votes: rex inclyte rhabdon
Hermes tu venias, verba nefanda ferens.
[Magician is with magician joined: Hermes,
King of the Wand, appear, bringing the ineffable word]
Crowley played the passive, and Neuburg the active, role. There were striking results. Mercury manifested in Neuburg, whom Crowley saw surrounded by a dazzling astral array—“the temple grew full of flashing caducei [the magical wand with intertwined serpents sacred to Mercury] of gold and yellow, the serpents alive and moving, Hermes bearing them. But so young and so mischievous was He that the sacrifice was impossible.” This last sentence was a veiled reference to Neuburg’s failure, on that opening night, to attain the steady erection necessary for the full manifestation of a Mercury.
The Third Working, on the night of January 3, included further instructions from the manifested Mercury on semen and shame. Semen, the life-giving principle, possesses an ambiguous power, for it creates the multitudes of worlds in which ignorance reigns. The key to enlightenment is—in a teaching akin to that of certain Gnostic sects—immersion in Chaos itself, that is, in the cosmic wisdom that transcends the illusory order of the earthly realm:
Every drop of semen which Hermes sheds is a world. The technical term for this semen is KPATOS [Greek, Kratos, force or strength]. Those worlds are held in chains, but invisibly. People upon the worlds are like maggots upon an apple—all forms of life bred by the worlds are in the nature of parasites. Pure worlds are flaming globes, each a conscious being.[ … ]
The name of this Phallus is Thoth, Hermes or Mà. Mà is the god who seduced the Phallus away from the Yoni; hence the physical Universe. All worlds are excreta; they represent wasted semen. Therefore all is blasphemy. This explains why man made god in his own image.
The feminine side of Mà is Pan, which explains why Pan is a devil. The only way to be really born is by an annihilation—to be born into Chaos, where Pan is the Saviour.
The creation of the physical universe is thus portrayed as the side effect of a coitus interruptus. That much is paralleled in a number of world myths. But there is a cosmogonic innovation unique to the Paris Working. The seduction which leads to this is homoerotic in essence: The male god Mà seducing the Phallus away from the Yoni or vagina. Mercury goes on to affirm that sex, the unshaped primal energy, may be coveted and embraced without sin or shame. As Mercury exclaimed at one point (with commentary by Crowley):
‘What fools to bother about the room, you don’t think I am in the room, do you?’ He wants us to overcome shame generally, and says ‘There is no shame about me, is there?’
He suggests an obvious method which I blush to repeat.
In a note to the record, Crowley described the “obvious method” as: “An holy act before the world. (This was done at the house of the Lay Sister J.C. [Jane Chéron] The Art-Bachelor W. D. [Walter Duranty] was the victim.” In plain terms, Crowley and Duranty engaged in the “holy act” of homosexual union with Cheron as witness. Whether others were present is unknown; but to display his homosexuality before a woman must have been sufficiently difficult to satisfy, in essence, the condition of performing the act “before the world.” Mercury had prescribed for Crowley the same cure which Crowley invariably tendered to his disciples—acting out the shameful deed to the hilt. The Paris Working did not, however, suffice to eradicate this shame within Crowley.
In subsequent evenings, the Paris Working rituals continued to explore the themes of Jupiterian prosperity and of Hermetic exploration of the mysteries of sexual magic. The Ninth Working illustrated the former: Jupiter was manifested in the form of the Father—“with gold were his hands full.” This promise of imminent riches was heartening to Crowley. In the Eleventh Working—and again in the Thirteenth—Crowley experienced intense visions of two prior incarnations, both pertaining to the erotomagical current between Crowley and Neuburg.
During the Eleventh Working, Crowley recalled his life as Astarte, a sacred prostitute in Agrigentum, a Greek city founded centuries before the time of Christ in southern Sicily. There is no historical basis to confirm or deny the existence of a sacred temple cult in that city; but then, Crowley was not pretending to historical accuracy. In Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley would stress that the ultimate test of any “magical memory” of a past life was its usefulness to the adept himself: “Far be it from any apologist of Magick to insist upon the objective validity of these concoatenations![ … ] We may therefore say that any magical recollection is genuine if it gives the explanation of our external or internal conditions. Anything which throws light upon the Universe, anything which reveals to us ourselves, should be welcome in this world of riddles.” In the Eleventh Working, it was further revealed to Crowley “that the essence of the Operation is the freeing of the elemental spirit of an animal soul. This may be done by death, or by complete exhaustion either through pleasure or through pain. In this death-like trance the spirit becomes free to wander, & is united to the invoked God.” Crowley would, later this same year, encode these teachings into his De Arte Magica [On the Magical Art], one of his secret instructions (highly symbolic in style) as to the higher O.T.O. degrees devoted to sexual magic.
Sex and death were also intertwined in the Thirteenth Working. A second vision of a prior incarnation was set in the Minoan civilization of Crete. In this vision, however, both Crowley and Neuburg were explicitly present—and entangled in a tragic romance. In Crete, Crowley’s name was Aia, after Gaia the earth goddess. Aia, like Astarte, serves in the sacred temple, but as a dancer as opposed to a prostitute. In function, however, there is little practical difference: arousal of sexual energy for sacred purposes is the vocation of Aia. Neuburg is Mardocles, a handsome merchant who falls in love with Aia—to his ruin. Indeed, Mardocles (according to the magical record) “hated” Aia “but was too chivalrous to leave her.”
Mardocles and Aia come to a horrific end. As part of his initiation into the temple, Mardocles is compelled to watch Aia perform a seductive dance. There are two, and only two, possible responses allowed him by the priests: he can watch unmoved, or he can violently rape her. Failure to adhere to one of these carries a punishment of castration, followed by death. But Mardocles is incapable of either option, and instead arranges an escape from the temple with Aia. The two evade punishment, but are ritually disgraced. The esoteric idea embedded in this vision was that experimentation with sexual magic was rife in the ancient world:
This is the great idea of magicians in all times—
To obtain a Messiah by some adaptation of the sexual process.
In Assyria they tried incest; also in Egypt; the Egyptians tried brothers and sisters, the Assyrians mothers and sons. Phoenicians tried fathers and daughters; Greeks and Syrians mostly bestiality. This idea came from India. The Jews sought to do this by invocation methods. (Also by paedicatio feminarum [buggery of women]). The Mohammedans tried homosexuality; mediaeval philosophers tried to produce homunculi by making chemical experiments with semen.
But the root idea is that any form of procreation other than normal is likely to produce results of a magical character.
The principal difference between Crowley’s sexual magic and traditional Tantric practices now becomes clear. For Crowley, the object of the ritual was not limited to mystical union with the goddess or god, but could further involve the creation of a new spiritual form—a “magical child,” as Crowley would come to call it. This magical child could be, in essence, any form of concentrated inspiration, or it could manifest physically as a
talisman or even within a human being—as in a newborn baby, or a newly spiritually transformed adult man or woman. Crowley would later devote considerable energies to the creation of these forms.
On a more personal level, the unhappiness of Mardocles and Aia pre-figured what was to come between Neuburg and Crowley. In the vision, Aia–Crowley declares to Mardocles–Neuburg that she knows he has never truly loved her:
I am always unlucky for you, you know; you always have to sacrifice everything for my love. You don’t want to in the least; this is because we both have hold of the wrong end of the stick. If only I could leave you, and you could love me. It would be lucky. But that has apparently never happened. Mutual indifference and mutual passion, and so on.
The strain between them—foreshadowed by Aia’s complaint to Mardocles—was growing.
The Paris Workings completed, Crowley turned again to the task of strengthening the O.T.O. A vital source of support here was George M. Cowie, whom Crowley first met in June 1914. Cowie had joined the O.T.O. in 1912—his magical name was Frater Fiat Pax (“Let there be peace”)—and was a rapt devotee of Crowley’s writings. Already in his fifties, Cowie suffered from deafness and was a model of decent propriety in his daily life. Crowley appointed him Grand Treasurer General of the British branch (M.M.M.) of the O.T.O. This was a crucial step, as Crowley had come to see the M.M.M. as the key to stabilizing his finances. The grand plan was for the M.M.M. to act as a kind of insurance fund for all members who made financial contributions. Its collective resources were to be apportioned to members as need arose. In practical operation, Crowley was both the principal contributor and the principal recipient. In late 1913, he had mortgaged Boleskine House. Now, in 1914, he put it up for lease, with rental proceeds to go to the M.M.M., which had been assigned title. Cowie was to manage Boleskine, to look after certain of Crowley’s publishing ventures and, most importantly, to pay Crowley when—and in the amounts—Crowley demanded. But Crowley’s books brought in nothing, and Boleskine very little; and so the dedicated Cowie took to supplementing his teacher’s income out of his own pocket. He thus became a rare source of support for Crowley during the coming war years.
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