Late in March, while in Florida, Crowley received troubling news from George Cowie, his O.T.O. treasurer in London. Concerns raised over Crowley’s articles in The Fatherland had led to a police raid on the London headquarters; the membership, never a large one, was dispersed by the threat of being publicly associated with a treasonous leader. Crowley’s career in counterespionage was, in any event, about to end. On April 6, the United States declared war on Germany—an act which, Crowley felt, crowned his propaganda efforts with success. But he continued to write for Viereck for two reasons: the money and the outlet for his work.
In New York, Crowley received a second dose of troubling news from England—his mother, Emily, had died. His diary entry reveals a tone that is surprising for its sheer normality—that of a son grieved by the loss: “Had news of my mother’s death. Two nights before news had dream that she was dead, with a feeling of extreme distress. The same happened two nights before I had news of my father’s death. I had often dreamed that my mother had died, but never with that helpless lonely feeling.” The estate of Emily Crowley was placed into a settlement trust; the majority of the funds went to his former wife Rose and their daughter, Lola Zaza. But Crowley received an annual sum of roughly £300, doled out in weekly installments. It was not enough for Crowley to live on, but it did serve as a financial buffer. As Gerald Yorke later observed of Crowley, “There is much exaggeration about his complete lack of money and about his extravagance.” Crowley could make do when he had to, and the trust was his means of so doing.
A further buttress to Crowley’s finances came in July when Viereck named Crowley the acting editor of The International. Unlike The Fatherland, this sister publication was primarily an arts journal with vaguely avant-garde sympathies. Viereck—beset by the declining circulation of The Fatherland—turned The International over to Crowley largely out of expediency. Crowley was willing to work for a mere twenty dollars per week; and he could, by himself, virtually fill the pages of The International on a monthly basis, minimizing the need to pay outside contributors. Crowley now had—for the first time since The Equinox—an unimpeded outlet for his works. To mask his omnipresence, he employed an array of pseudonyms for his contributions, which ranged from fiction to poems to reviews to ornate essays on magic and the New Aeon. Meanwhile, Viereck was shopping the magazine around to potential buyers.
Crowley would have been delighted to buy, but it was out of the question. Cowie, in London, had informed Crowley in a series of letters that the O.T.O. treasury was tapped (there was no more cash to be wrung from the mortgaged Boleskine House) and that Crowley had been selfish in his demands for support and should instead devise an income of his own. Relations between them soon came to an end; Cowie had lost a master, and Crowley had lost a loyal friend. The last vestige of a formal O.T.O. organization in England had come to an end.
But there were compensations. After a relative dry spell that had lasted since his break with Ratan Devi, Crowley enjoyed a series of romantic attachments in the late summer of 1917 and on into the following year. In August, he met a young woman, Anna Catherine Miller, whom he named The Dog, based on her physical and magical correspondence to Anubis, the dog-headed Egyptian god of the dead. One might speculate that Miller seemed, to Crowley, a guide through the perils of dying to oneself that accompanied the Magus grade. But Crowley was prosaic in his account of her: “She was a Pennsylvania Dutch girl, the only member of her family not actually insane. We joined forces and took a furnished apartment in a corner house on Central Park West near its northern limit at 110th Street.” Early in October, Crowley moved to a studio on West 9th Street and—as was his romantic modus operandi—took up with a friend of Miller who would prove to be a far more serious love.
Her name was Roddie Minor. Crowley dubbed her alternately Eve, Soror Ahitha and, most prominently, The Camel, because, in magical terms, “such a journey as I was now about to undertake required an animal of greater strength and size than the dog. To take me to the next oasis I required a camel [ … ]” Minor was married but living apart from her husband, and was employed as a chemist. Crowley described her ambiguously as “a near artist of German extraction. She was physically a magnificent animal, with a man’s brain well stocked with general knowledge and a special comprehension of chemistry and pharmacy.” This comprehension included a fondness for drug intake that suited Crowley well. As for her “man’s brain,” this also was to his liking—“for some months everything went as smoothly as if she had been really a man.” A diary entry of January 7, 1918, illustrates Crowley’s tendency to measure his spiritual progress by his ability to overcome shame and to exult in the power of sexuality:
I now do all those things which voluptuaries do, with equal or greater enthusiasm and power; but always for an Ulterior End. In this matter I am reproached by that whore of niggers and dogs [Roddie Minor], with whom I am now living in much worse than adultery; for she exhorts me to the Way of the Tao. But is not this for me perhaps That Way, that I should always follow Art and the Salvation of the World? Am not I Saint Edward, the Warden, and Alexander, Helper of Men?
The phrase “whore of niggers and dogs” was less an attack upon Minor than a deliberate heightening of the foul—and hence, in Crowley’s view, spiritually efficacious—nature of the desires he now indulged. That Minor was a “whore” was part and parcel of her ascension to the role of Scarlet Woman, a role which she cherished while she was with Crowley. The “dog” was Miller, who still engaged in sexual magic with Crowley early in 1918. As for the “nigger,” this was Walter Gray, an African-American musician and a friend of Minor who became, during this time, a frequent partner of Crowley in XI° homosexual operations.
During this period, Crowley experienced his longest continuous communication with a denizen of an astral or unearthly realm. As always in such cases, Crowley required a psychic medium of some kind to sustain contact. Now, through the winter and spring of 1918, there was Roddie Minor and her visions of the spirit-being Amalantrah. As the months went on, there were a number of other women who took part in the invocations of Amalantrah; so too did Walter Gray. But Minor remained the primary seer.
It was Minor who first revealed this startling new spirit-being, whom she named, at first, “The Wizard.” On the night of January 14, 1918, while smoking opium and lying on a mattress on the floor of their apartment, she began to experience visions. Crowley professed to be annoyed. But a mention by Minor of “an egg under a palm tree” roused him to attention, as it had been Abuldiz, some six years earlier, who had instructed Crowley to go to the desert to find just such a sight. Crowley took up the scent, and the Amalantrah Working, as he called it, was underway.
Minor kept a magical record for several months. The typical means of invocation was through sexual magic, often performed under the influence of drugs. The description of the Wizard Amalantrah recorded by Minor resembles Crowley’s mystic detective Simon Iff; both are elderly and wise, and both take recourse in the wisdom of the East. On the astral plane, Minor approached the Wizard: “I asked who I was and he said ‘Part of the Tao.’”
Minor was the primary Scarlet Woman during the first three months. But by March her role as consort to the Beast was threatened by new passions on Crowley’s part, most notably for Eva Tanguay, then the preeminent female star of the vaudeville circuit. Tanguay was known as “The ‘I Don’t Care’ Girl” after one of her trademark songs. She was a fearlessly sensuous and outlandish stage performer, employing elaborate costume changes and performing numbers such as Salomé’s dance of the seven veils. Amongst her many reputed lovers was the African-American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. And for a very brief time, she and Crowley were lovers, and Crowley—overtaken with passion—yearned to marry her.
The ends of the affairs with Tanguay and the others are all equally veiled in mystery. One of the goals of the Amalantrah Working was to determine the proper course of relations with these women. But this proved beyond Crowley’s powers: “I doubt whethe
r I trusted the Wizard as I should have done.”
The reason for the end of Crowley’s relationship with The International is far easier to determine. In the spring of 1918, Viereck sold that magazine to Crowley’s former admirer, Professor Keasbey. Thereafter, Crowley was persona non grata. The International did not survive long under Keasbey’s management, but the sudden expulsion from its offices stung Crowley to the quick. He weathered the loss of salary through a combination of family trust payments and sporadic assistance from Minor and the other women passing through his life.
During the same period as the Amalantrah Working, Crowley was at work on a volume that stands as one of his most striking literary and magical achievements: Liber Aleph, the Book of Wisdom or Folly (first published posthumously in 1962). Liber Aleph was written primarily as a text of instruction to his “magical son,” Jones. The Hebrew letter aleph is a Tarot attribution of the Fool, and Liber Aleph, like The Book of Lies before it, is a series of compressed and paradoxical observations on the elusive nature of Wisdom that seem as mere Folly to the uninitiated. The book certainly has its weaknesses, first and foremost of which is its blatant and repetitive misogyny. But there are also, within it, singular examples of clarity and elegant concision, such as the second chapter—“De Arte Kabbalistica” (“On the Art of the Qabalah”). Nowhere did he express more aptly the nature and purpose of kabbalah from the perspective of the magical tradition—as a means of framing correspondences of thought and tendencies of mind:
Do thou study most constantly, my Son, in the Art of the Holy Qabalah. Know that herein the Relations between Numbers, though they be mighty in Power and prodigal of Knowledge, are but lesser Things. For the Work is to reduce all other Conceptions to these of Number, because thus thou wilt lay bare the very Structure of thy Mind, whose rule is Necessity rather than Prejudice. Not until the Universe is thus laid naked before thee canst thou truly anatomize it.
Crowley’s passionate affair with Roddie Minor came to a friendly end by the summer of 1918, though they continued now and then to be lovers. In its aftermath, Crowley deemed himself ready for another Great Magical Retirement. Crowley’s budget-conscious selection of a retirement site was Esopus Island, a small uninhabited isle far up the Hudson River in Dutchess County. Crowley resolved to make his way there by the strenuous means of paddling upstream in a canoe fitted with a sail. His own ready funds were limited, but a number of friends came to the rescue. One of these was William Seabrook, a then-famous journalist. Seabrook, fascinated both by the occult and by Crowley the man, described the latter’s flamboyant departure up the Hudson (the first part of the journey by a ferry that would transport Crowley and his canoe out of the city):
The ‘provisions’ looked suspicious, and since we’d paid for them, we decided to inspect them. They consisted of fifty gallons of red paint, three big house-painter’s brushes, and a heavy coil of rope.[ … ] He’d blown every cent for the red paint. He had nothing in his pockets except the ticket for the trip up the river.
“What are you going to eat, for crying out loud?” we asked, and he replied, in his heaviest pontifical manner,
“My children, I am going to Esopus Island, and I will be fed as Elijah was fed by the ravens.”
For his first weekend on the island, Minor came to visit, bringing along needed food supplies.
What became of the red paint and how did Crowley feed himself? The answers are intertwined. Shortly after arrival, Crowley decided upon a project to proclaim the word of Thelema, which might today be viewed as a controversial work of “environmental art.” As Crowley described it, “On both the east and west shores of the island are wide steep cliffs of smooth rock, obviously provided by Providence for my convenience in proclaiming the Law. I devoted a couple of days of painting ‘Do what thou wilt’ on both banks for the benefit of passing steamers.” According to Seabrook, this caught the attention of the farmer residents of the area. Curiosity aroused, they visited the island to meet its new resident and to bring gifts of eggs, milk and corn.
Jones also came to see his master for a time, though the nature of the magical work they performed together remains a mystery. Jones—some thirty years later—destroyed the bulk of Crowley’s magical diary of that time, which had fallen into Jones’s possession. Shortly after leaving the island, Jones sent Crowley a letter announcing his decision (for what would prove to be a brief period) to resign from the O.T.O. According to Jones, Crowley subsequently waged magical warfare against Jones’s wife, whom Crowley blamed for inducing the resignation. Jones must have come to know of this warfare only at a later date, else it is difficult to conceive how the two men resumed a close magical alliance after Crowley’s return to New York in mid-September, as was the case.
There were two primary magical accomplishments during this retirement. The first was a prolonged meditation, during August, by means of the Sammasati backward memory technique. The result was a recall, by Crowley, of a chain of past lives that had progressed karmically to his present status as Magus and prophet. This was not the first occasion on which Crowley had pondered his prior lives. As we have seen, he had already decided upon certain prior incarnations: the ancient Egyptian priest Ankh-af-na-Khonsu, the Grecian sacred prostitute Astarte (relived during the 1914 Paris Working), the Elizabethan scryer Edward Kelly, and the nineteenth-century magus Eliphas Levi. But on Esopus Island, Crowley experienced intense meditative visions—from his “Magical Memory” —that revealed a course of highly wayward dramatic existences from over two millennia. Whether he employed drugs during these meditations is not known, but it seems likely.
Crowley never argued for the truth of these visions, nor did he reject the possibility of their truth. As he later wrote, “I refuse to assert any theory of what this really means. All memory is a re-awakening of ancient impressions. What I was really doing was penetrating to the deeper layers of my unconscious self.”
As Crowley was remembering backwards, the lives he saw will be recounted in that order. Just prior to his own birth he was Levi. Before Levi, he was Count Cagliostro, born Giuseppe Balsamo, a Sicilian peasant who rose to become one of the most controversial figures of the eighteenth century, a self-proclaimed master of magic with rumored ties to radical French Freemasonry, who died in Rome, a prisoner of the Inquisition. Prior to his time as Cagliostro, Crowley passed through a rather squalid series of four incarnations. The first of these is described in his diary entry for August 24, 1918:
The incarnation before Cagliostro is very obscure. It seems to have been the result of some serious magical error connected to the grade of Adeptus Major. I remember myself as a dark, pallid pimply youth with hollow eyes purple-ringed, a sparse beardlet, a head too big for the body, fleshless, without strength, nervous almost to insanity, a haunted look.
I hanged myself at the age of 26–28. [ … ]
Before this, he was Heinrich von Dorn, an incarnation which Crowley regarded as “very black-magical, in an entirely futile way. It is a tale of grimoires and vain evil rites, of pacts at which Satan mocked, and crimes unworthy even of witches.” Prior to this he was Father Ivan, a soldier in religious wars before joining a militant order of monks somewhere in southeastern Europe. Father Ivan served nominally as the librarian for these monks; his knowledge of Greek was immense and he wrote books on historical subjects. But his real interests lay elsewhere—in the furthering of unnamed political intrigues and the practice of fearsome magical rites: “My vices were sinister, not to be described, though I remember many details. I delighted in cruelty, especially towards women. I repeatedly, even habitually, invoked ‘The Devil’.” Prior to this, Crowley lived under a name he could not recall. But his character traits remained vivid:
I was really more girl than boy, an hermaphrodite dreadfully malformed. I was rich and well-born; I remember my dark blue velvet breeches and lace cape and feathered hat. My hair was a shock of fawn. I was thin, small, tuberculous, with some spinal curvature, very slight. I had a fierce temper, and was a
hater of mankind. I died of syphilis contracted from a German Ritter, who raped me.[ … ] All these messes seem to have been expiations of [Edward] Kelly’s blunder in not accepting the Law which was shadowed forth to him.
Crowley ultimately plotted out the course of existences that preceded Kelly. During the high Renaissance he was Alexander Borgia, who in 1492 became Pope Alexander VI and thereafter reigned as a supremely decadent pontiff—accusations of murder and incest swirling about him—until his death in 1503. Crowley’s own assessment of his reign as Alexander VI was dismissive. His task had been “to bring oriental wisdom to Europe and to restore paganism in a purer form.” But he deemed himself to have “failed in my task of crowning the Renaissance, through not being wholly purified in my personal character.”
There is a sizable gap between the Borgia pope and a nameless but momentous incarnation just before the birth of Mohammed. In this life, Crowley recalled being “present at a Council of Masters. The critical question was the policy to be adopted in order to help humanity. A small minority, including myself, was hot for positive action; definite movements were to be made; in particular, the mysteries were to be revealed. The majority, especially the Asiatic Masters, refused even to discuss the proposal. They contemptuously refrained from voting, as if to say, ‘Let the youngsters learn their lesson.’” The result was a series of incarnations in which the activist wing, as it were, was given its chance—with mixed results. Crowley himself was somehow involved in the tragic downfall of the Templars.
There is one more distant incarnation to tell. In the time of Lao Tzu—roughly the sixth century B.C.—Crowley lived as Ko Hsuen, a disciple of the great Chinese Taoist master. The Khing Kang King, known as the Classic of Purity, was the work of Ko Hsuen; fittingly, then, Crowley chose to cast it, from an extant translation, into English verse. The Wizard Amalantrah, associated with the Way of the Tao, proved a useful collaborator for a second translation—of the Tao Te Ching—that Crowley completed on Esopus Island. Just how Amalantrah was summoned “in almost daily communion” is unclear. Crowley’s translation, in prose, was based on the well-known version by scholar James Legge; but Crowley possessed the unique advantage of having Amalantrah exhibit to him “a codex of the original, which conveyed to me with absolute certitude the exact significance of the text.”
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