Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  The Monkey was Alice Richardson, an Englishwoman from Yorkshire and the wife of the famous art critic and historian of religion Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Under the stage name Ratan Devi, Richardson had made a name for herself as a gifted mezzo-soprano interpreter of traditional East Indian vocal music. Crowley and Devi together performed—beginning in April 1916—a series of sex magic operations at least one of which, on April 15, Crowley found extraordinary. From his diary: “This Operation is the most magnificent in all ways since I can remember. The orgasm was such as to have completely drowned the memory of the [magical] Object [which was to be retained in mind throughout], but after, I found myself saying, “Namo Shivaya namaha Aum’ [mantra to the Hindu god Shiva, which would indicate that Crowley had identified himself with Shiva and Devi with his divine consort, Shakti].”

  Just prior to commencing his affair with Devi, Crowley had also begun sexual operations with The Owl, otherwise known as Gerda Maria von Kothek. Little is known of The Owl beyond Crowley’s brief allusions to her as a “German prostitute” and as a “regular Broadway type.” The distinction Crowley drew between The Owl and The Monkey was the same as with The Snake and The Cat—that of the base, lustful woman (whom he cannot love) as opposed to the creative female (whom he adores but cannot trust).

  As for Coomaraswamy, he too was given a theriomorphic name by Crowley—the only male acquaintance of this time to receive such a distinction. “The Worm,” Crowley called him, and went on to accuse him of black magic. Crowley’s portrait of Coomaraswamy is laced with malice and racism, and does not conform in the slightest with what is otherwise known of Coomaraswamy. In brief, Crowley alleged that The Worm consented to his wife going off with Crowley as he found her too expensive to care for; that he asked Crowley, during the affair, to procure substitute sex partners for him; and that he crassly decided to take Devi back when she began to enjoy financial success from her performances.

  There was one further complicating factor. Crowley and The Monkey had succeeded in accomplishing that which had eluded Crowley and The Cat. Ratan Devi became pregnant by the end of their first month together. In late May, they performed sexual magic for the purpose of assuring a safe pregnancy. But here, Crowley charged, they were frustrated by Coomaraswamy, who in the summer of 1916 persuaded his wife to sail to England, where her other children lived, for the remainder of her confinement. According to Crowley, Coomaraswamy was aware that his wife was subject to extreme sea sickness and intended, by this plan, to cause the premature deaths of his unfaithful wife and the bastard child. In the Confessions, Crowley explained that while he suspected the worst, he refused to put pressure on Devi to stay in America. The worst occurred. As Crowley wrote: “The Eurasian’s calculations were not far wrong. The voyage caused a miscarriage and she lay between life and death for over six weeks.”

  As with the death of his first child, which occurred after he left Rose to return to England on her own from India in 1905—Crowley responded to the tragedy by blaming others. The plan for Rose to travel separately was conceived by Crowley. The plan to have Devi sail while pregnant was passively allowed by him. In the first case, he reviled the stupidity of Rose. In the second, the “half-breed” Coomaraswamy was criminally at fault. The racism of Crowley’s attacks was blatant and shameless. Coomaraswamy, whose South Asian father was knighted, was born in Ceylon of an English mother and taken to England to live at the age of eight months. He was already, when Crowley met him, one of the most influential art historians of his era. Early on, the two men had fruitful discussions on Buddhist philosophy. But to Crowley he remained “the Eurasian.”

  In June 1916, Crowley decided that the time had come for a Great Magical Retirement. The person to whom he turned for a suitably secluded location was Evangeline Adams, who would become the most famous writer on astrology in America. The previous year, Adams engaged Crowley to serve as a ghostwriter to produce the bulk of two books that would be published under Adams’s name—Astrology: Your Place in the Sun (1928) and Astrology—Your Place Among the Stars (1930). Crowley’s interest in astrology had been growing steadily, and he no doubt welcomed the opportunity to express himself at length on its workings while receiving needed funds from Adams, whose name would sell far more copies of the book than would Crowley’s. Later, in the Confessions, he charged, with some justice, that Adams was ignorant of her field and had defrauded him of his promised share of the profits. But they were close enough friends in 1916 that Adams allowed Crowley the private use of her cottage on Lake Pasquaney near Bristol, New Hampshire. Crowley stayed on here for four months—from mid-June through mid-October—during which he would perform one of the most singular magical rituals of his career.

  Uninhibited drug use was one of the delights of this magical retirement. Heroin was an adjunct stimulus in a number of solitary sex operations. Cocaine and opium were also on hand. But his primary delight came from a relatively recent discovery, ether or ethyl oxide, a pungent anesthetic liquid, the vapors from which he inhaled from a bottle with a long, thin neck. During this summer, Crowley commenced a series of experiments with this drug; the results were ultimately recorded in an essay, “Ethyl Oxide,” written in 1923. There, Crowley argued that meditations conducted under the influence of the drug were helpful in ascertaining one’s “True Will.” Further, he drew the analogy between the ether experiences and sexual orgasm:

  The [ethyl oxide] experimenter will learn to recognize instinctively when he has reached the desired result. It comes as a climax with the force of a revelation. [ … ] The point is that a genuine ‘revelation’ exhausts the species of Energy involved for the time being. The parallel case is the occurrence of orgasm in sexual intercourse. A perfect orgasm should leave no lust: if one wants to go on, it simply shows that one has failed to collect every element of the personality, and discharge it utterly in a single explosion!

  The equivalent of the perfect etheric orgasm was granted to Crowley that summer. The date was August 23. Crowley described it in his diary—just after it happened—as “the Ultimate Samadhi.” His later name for it would be the “Star-Sponge Vision,” and it remained a joyous touchstone of his spiritual quest:

  I lost consciousness of everything but a universal space in which were innumerable bright points, and I realized this as a physical representation of the universe, in what I may call its essential structure. I exclaimed, ‘Nothingness but twinkles!’ I concentrated upon this vision, with the result that the void space which had been the principal element of it diminished in importance; space appeared to be ablaze, yet the radiant points were not confused, and I thereupon completed my sentence with the exclamation, ‘but what twinkles!’

  This later account (in a commentary on The Book of the Law), which far exceeded the contemporaneous diary in detail, made no mention of his having taken ether. In his essay “Ethyl Oxide,” Crowley referred to the ‘revelation’ afforded by the drug in single quotes. What ambiguity was thus implied? There is a telling passage in another writing of that summer—a lengthy study entitled The Gospel According to St. Bernard Shaw—that establishes the depth of Crowley’s hesitancies on this matter.

  A mention of the context in which Gospel was written is in order. Crowley had long been fascinated by the career of George Bernard Shaw, who had achieved a status Crowley must have envied: that of a respected gadfly of British society. In his preface to his play Androcles and the Lion (1913), Shaw argued on behalf of Jesus not as a revealed god but as a wise social philosopher. Crowley was filled with a passion to refute this premise on the grounds that Jesus was not a genuine historical figure.

  There is, in Gospel, a passage in which Crowley dismissed the claim of drugs to approach the heights of traditional mystical practice:

  But why should we talk of drugs? They are only counterfeit notes, or at best the Fiat notes of a discredited government, and we are seeking gold.

  This pure gold is ours for the asking; its name is mysticism.

  We may begin by reassuring
ourselves. The gold is really in the vaults of the Treasury. [ … ] and the chief reason why we should not burglariously use such skeleton keys as morphia is that by so doing we are likely to hamper the lock.

  Crowley drew heavily, in his attacks on the historicity of Jesus in Gospel, on the findings of what was then the supreme scholarly work in comparative religion, the multi-volume Golden Bough of Sir J. G. Frazer. Indeed, the influence of Frazer, whom Crowley was reading during this summer, was so strong that in August–September 1916 he dashed off a series of eight stories—six of which would be published in The International—entitled Golden Twigs, to underscore his debt.

  But the influence of Frazer went still further. The structure of the central ritual conducted by Crowley during this Retirement came from Frazer, whom Crowley paraphrased in Gospel as to the spiritual framework of the Crucifixion: “The entire symbolism of the Jesus who died and rose again is astrological and mystic in its minutest points. [ … ] not at all the record of what happened to any one man, but of what happens to all men.”

  Crowley borrowed from this Crucifixion sequence for his “ceremony of the assumption of the curse of the Grade of Magus.” The purpose of this ceremony stemmed from a psychological crisis now reaching desperate proportions within Crowley—his sense that he did not, in his daily self, resemble that which he understood to be the nature of the attained Magus. From his diary entry for July 12, 1916:

  There is nothing in me that corresponds at all to the grade. There is utter impotence on all planes.[ … ] I do not in the least fail to understand the grade; I am simply unable to act. It is no good making up my mind to do anything material; for I have no means. But this would vanish if I could make up my mind. I am as it were inhibited from everything. I am tempted for example to crucify a toad, or copulate with a duck, sheep, or goat, or set a house on fire or murder someone with the idea—a perfectly good magical idea, of course—that some supreme violation of all the laws of my being would break down my Karma or dissolve the spell that seems to bind me. And I cannot do it, because (chiefly) I have no faith that it would actually do so.

  That a Magus must break the bonds of karma—burn away his egoistic consciousness in the “urn” of initiation—was basic to Crowley’s conception of the grade. Amongst these bonds was the Christian childhood that he would try—once again—to put to rest.

  On July 17, Crowley commenced his ceremony, later recorded by him as Liber LXX (a number kabbalistically linked to the Devil trump of the Tarot deck). It consisted of seven stages performed in sequence from 2 A.M. to 9:45 P.M. First, in the dead of night, came the capture of the frog, who embodied both Mercury the Snake of wisdom and the “mystery of conception” as formulated in silence as an affirmation of one’s will. Then followed the ritual birth, baptism, worship, trial, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of the frog. The trial was the most dramatic portion of the rite, as it portrayed the remembered pain of Crowley’s childhood:

  Night being fallen, thou shalt arrest the frog, and accuse him of blasphemy, and so forth in these words:

  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Lo, Jesus of Nazareth, how thou art taken in my snare. All my life long thou hast plagued me and affronted me. In thy name—with all other free souls in Christendom—I have been tortured in my boyhood; all delights have been forbidden unto me, and that which is owed to me they pay not—in thy name. Now at last I have thee; the Slave-God is in the power of the Lord of Freedom.[ … ] Give thou place to me, O Jesus; thine aeon is passed; the Age of Horus is arisen by the Master the Great Beast that is a man; and his number is Six hundred and threescore and six. Love is the law, love under will.

  I To Mega Therion therefore condemn thee Jesus the Slave-God to be mocked and spat upon and scourged and then crucified.

  The sentence was then executed, with the legs of the animal eaten to confirm the magical link between Magus and frog—which, invested with the spirit of Jesus, now served as a willing familiar. The rest of the body was burned to signify the end of the Old Aeon. This was one of the rare magical occasions when Crowley sacrificed a living creature. As his July 12 diary entry indicated, this went strongly against his conscious convictions.

  Shortly after this ritual, Crowley received a telegram from Jones in Vancouver, who claimed that on June 21 he had passed beyond the stage of a Babe of the Abyss and emerged as an 8°=3□ Master of the Temple. His motto for this grade embodied his new mystical perspective: Unus in Omnia, Omnia in Unum (One in All, All in One). Crowley was delighted, albeit for two reasons having more to do with himself than with Jones. First, it proved the remarkable efficacy of the A∴A∴—how else could Jones have attained so much since becoming a Neophyte a mere seven years earlier? Second, it confirmed that operations with Jeanne Foster the previous autumn—nine months earlier—had indeed borne him a son. More precisely, Jones was a “Magical Son,” one who had absorbed, by way of etheric or astral influence, the spiritual intent of those operations. Crowley wrote to Jones to confirm him in his new grade.

  In October, the Beast returned to New York. He was still contributing to The Fatherland, but otherwise had few practical prospects. In December, he traveled to New Orleans, one of the few American cities for which he held a fondness. A more practical reason for heading south was to renew contact again with Keasbey, a history professor at the University of Texas. Keasbey had paid Crowley a visit at Lake Pasquaney in September; the reason, according to Crowley, was that Keasbey admired Crowley’s writings and wanted to meet the man. Whether Crowley went to Austin to visit Keasbey is unclear; what is plain is that relations between them broke down. As we shall see, the bad blood between them would cost Crowley dearly before his time in America was over.

  Crowley remained in New Orleans through the winter of 1917. It was a time marked by prolific writing strangely coupled with extreme doubt over his magical vocation. With the aim (which proved futile) of achieving a commercial success, Crowley created a detective, Simon Iff, whose exploits he chronicled in six stories under the title The Scrutinies of Simon Iff; these were published serially in The International from September 1917 through February 1918. (Over the next year, Crowley wrote over a dozen more Iff stories, none of which found an immediate publisher.)

  Crowley carried the figure of Iff into a novel written during this same New Orleans winter, in which Iff shed his status as a detective and emerged as a mystic outright. The novel, Moonchild, would eventually be published in 1929. The original title of the novel, The Butterfly Net, refers to the capture of the soul (the butterfly) by the means of ritual magic (the net). In one sense, Moonchild is a literary response to Somerset Maugham, who had attempted the same basic theme in The Magician some ten years earlier. But the novel is also very much a product of Crowley’s World War One years insofar as its central theme—the production of a homunculus or magical child—had become an obsession at this time. Its account of the war includes episodes of masterful spying for the Allied cause by one Cyril Grey, a dapper and brilliant magician who is a younger fantasy projection of Crowley. Grey is ultimately made an Officer of the Legion of Honour by a grateful British army—in stark contrast to Crowley’s real status as an outsider suspected of treason. The evil counterpart to Grey, one Douglas, is based on Crowley’s old Chief, Mathers. Douglas is portrayed not only as a black magician (whom Grey bests in magical warfare) but also as a traitor to England. What gives the portrait an especially uneasy twist is that Mathers served the British cause during the war, establishing a center to train volunteers in first-aid skills. Crowley’s fictional projection of treason onto Mathers stands as a willed effort to wish upon one’s enemy that which is tormenting oneself.

  Back in September 1914, Crowley had composed—as his secret instruction for the IX° of the O.T.O., an essay-length instruction entitled “On the Homunculus.” Here is set forth the essential theory around which the events of Moonchild are constructed. Crowley adopted the traditional esoteric view that the fetus is without a soul during its first thre
e months in the womb. During this period, he deemed it magically possible to induce the incarnation of a nonhuman being—an elemental or planetary spirit—that embodied a quality such as eloquence or martial courage. The ritual couple would have to engage in sexual magic at astrologically favorable times until impregnation was achieved. If successful, the birth would produce a human form with formidable power and knowledge that would be dependent upon and subservient to the magician, as a human is to God. As Crowley later stressed, to achieve such a feat once in a lifetime would be remarkable, and to achieve it twice would mark one as a man who came along once in 100,000 years. Crowley longed to be such a man.

  In Moonchild, Cyril Grey was hindered both by the magical opposition of Douglas and the flitting inconstancy of his magical consort, Lisa la Giuffria, based on Crowley’s prewar lover, Mary d’Este Sturges. In a similar manner, Jeanne Foster had served to block Crowley’s ambition in America. But the emergence of Jones as a magical son offered reassurance. Moonchild was written to affirm Crowley’s hope that still greater feats could be achieved by way of the Royal Art of sexual magic.

  His outlook on his prophetic vocation continued to fluctuate, however. Early on in his stay in New Orleans, Crowley felt himself granted the “Beautific Vision” of mystical tradition—“the archetypal idea of beauty and harmony.” But the effect did not linger. As Crowley later wrote of his mood at this time: “Hope died in my heart. There was not one glimmer of light on the horizon anywhere. It seemed to me an obscene mockery to be called a Magus. I must have been afflicted by ‘lust of result’; at least it came to this, that I felt that I could not go on with my work.” Indeed, for a brief time Crowley committed what he termed “spiritual suicide”—a renunciation of his role as Magus. What drove Crowley back to this task was no sudden miracle, but rather a painful realization that he was fit for nothing else: “I found myself, like Othello, with my occupation gone. I might not be able to perform the task of a Magus, but there was certainly nothing else for me to do.”