In Crowley’s view, all these past lives formed a sequence that had climaxed with his own birth. Certainly he cannot be accused of having overlooked unflattering prior incarnations. Nor can it be denied that there is a certain affinity between the personages Crowley cites—in particular, Borgia, Kelly, Cagliostro, and Levi—and himself.
In a June 1948 letter, Jones, who may have been present on Esopus Island during Crowley’s past-life visions, offered his own commentary on them. Jones was by then a disgruntled ex-disciple. Nonetheless, his views are likely to echo the suspicions of many:
Now I ask you this: If reincarnation be a true theory and these “memories” [be] of actual past lives or if these “memories” be but the outcropping of suppressed subconscious conditions acquired during his present life up till 1918—in either case, or any other supposition—does a man with this “background” (once the camouflage is off) appear worthy to be considered as a genuine Logos or Buddha, the true Leader of Humanity and representative on earth of The Sun. Or have we a genius duped and let down by dark forces?
It is noteworthy that Jones himself—in the aftermath of Crowley’s death—sought to be considered a Logos, and thus opened himself to the same objections as he had raised against Crowley.
There was, however, one final magical attainment in store for Crowley prior to his departure from Esopus Island. On September 5, Crowley recorded in his diary, and later transcribed in the Confessions (leaving open the possibility of later editing), the “climax” of the retirement—a “Samadhi” realization he termed a “Vision of Jupiter” that occurred during his afternoon Sammasati meditation: “In a single instant I had the Key to the whole of the Chinese wisdom. In the light—momentary glimpse though it was—of this truth, all systems of religion and philosophy became absolutely puerile. Even the Law appears no more than a curious incident. I remain absolutely bewildered, blinded, knowing what blasting image lies in this shrine. It baffles me to understand how my brother Magi, knowing this, ever went on.” Crowley offered this tentative summation—“I obtained a reconciliation of two contraries of which ‘There is a discrimination between good and evil’ is one.” The second contrary, of course, would have denied the existence of any such discrimination. Crowley had come to see the ultimate limitation of all conceptions, including his own Law of Thelema. For a brief moment, not even his role as prophet of the New Aeon mattered. Small wonder that he was so shaken.
Crowley righted himself by the time he returned to New York. His friend Seabrook recalled Crowley’s offer to prove that he had gained in magical power from his Retirement. They took a walk through midtown Manhattan on a course set by Seabrook. This led them to Fifth Avenue and the New York Public Library. Here Crowley bade Seabrook be silent and watch. As Seabrook described it:
Ahead of us was strolling a tall, prosperous-looking gentleman of leisure, and Crowley, silent as a cat, fell into step immediately behind him. Their footfalls began to synchronize, and then I observed that Crowley, who generally held himself pompously erect and had a tendency to strut, had dropped his shoulders, thrust his head forward a little, like the man’s in front, [and] had begun to swing his arms in perfect synchronization—now so perfect that he was like a moving shadow or astral ghost of the other.
As we neared the end of the block, A.C., in taking a step forward, let both his knees buckle suddenly under him, so that he dropped, caught himself on his haunches, and was immediately erect again, strolling.
The man in front of us fell as if his legs had been shot out from under him … and was sprawling. We helped him up, as a crowd gathered. He was unhurt. He thanked us, and looked for a banana peel.
Seabrook considered three explanations: (1) a prearranged confederate to take the pratfall; (2) unconscious identification, by way of the sound of footsteps, between the walking rhythms of Crowley and the man which, when suddenly broken, caused the fall; and (3) that Crowley possessed “supernormal powers.” Seabrook declared himself dissatisfied with all three, and here we also must leave the matter.
Jones now rejoined Crowley, who had relocated, in the last months of 1918, to an apartment at 1 University Place on Washington Square. During the ensuing winter, they traveled together to Detroit with two primary goals. The first was to forge an alliance with a group of Masons who resided there; that effort was a failure. But the journey did result in one tangible success. After five years of silence (the silence constituting an unwritten second volume), the first number of volume three of The Equinox was published on March 21, 1919, the time of the spring equinox. (This third volume is often called the Blue Equinox due to its blue cover binding.) Its limited publication was made possible by the owner of a Detroit printing company, Albert Ryerson, who volunteered the costs.
But the bulk of the Blue Equinox was devoted to acquainting unfamiliar readers with the teachings of Thelema. There was also a presentation, written by Crowley, of the life and attainments of Jones (under his magical name Frater Unus in Omnibus), entitled Liber CLXV: A Master of the Temple. As Hymenaeus Beta has observed, “Crowley was sparing no effort to secure his son’s future as a spiritual teacher.”
But Jones had a sizable surprise in store for his father. During his time with Crowley in autumn 1918, Jones had begun to sense within himself a major kabbalistic insight that might cast light upon the mysteries of The Book of the Law. This insight he did not communicate to Crowley, even though, in November 1918, he set it down in an essay entitled (in the manner of the master) Liber 31. After the troubled times in Detroit, Jones moved to Chicago for a time and then returned to his wife in Vancouver. From here, in early September 1919, Jones at last sent the text of Liber 31 to Crowley. The key discovery may be summarized briefly as follows: The Hebrew words for “God” [AL, the transliteration of the Hebrew letters aleph and lamed] and for “not” or “negation” [LA, the same two Hebrew letters reversed] both add up, by gematria, to thirty-one. This mutual identity reveals an ultimate mystery—that God, or any conception of life, is and is not. Surmounting the paradoxes of reason is essential to final attainment.
Upon reading Liber 31, Crowley became convinced that Jones was more than the “magical son” produced by his sexual operations with Jeanne Foster in October 1915. He now recognized Jones as the “child” prophesied by the Book itself (in III: 47)—a child who would unlock “mysteries that no Beast shall divine.” The verse stressed that “It shall be his child & that strangely.” Jones seemed perfectly to fulfill this. Crowley was elated and communicated this in a September 9 postcard to Jones. But Jones, in turn, was beginning to suspect (as he explained in a September 26, 1919, letter to Crowley) that his realization had to do with Kether, the Crown of the kabbalistic Tree of Life; this would make Jones an Ipsissimus, of the A∴A∴ grade of 10°=1□—the only possible higher grade from that of Crowley the Magus. Crowley would ignore hints in this direction from Jones, whom he never again saw in person. With the increasing assumption of magical authority by the “child,” the seeds of dissension between the two men were sown. Within a few years, they would fully blossom.
Parallel in time to these developments with Jones was the emergence, in New York, of a new Scarlet Woman. Her name was Leah Hirsig. She was thirty-five when she and Crowley met, a teacher at Public School No. 40 in the Bronx, and the mother of an infant son named Hansi (Crowley’s pet name for him would be “Dionysus”) who had been born out of wedlock; the father had disappeared abruptly from her life. Hirsig was trying to better her lot by attending a series of lectures on law at New York University. To say the least, her plans were changed when she linked herself with Aleister Crowley. For over seven years, she would remain with him—as lover, magical consort, confidante, and aide de camp in the battles to establish the Law of Thelema in the world. Never before Hirsig—and never after her—would a Scarlet Woman play as deeply fundamental a role in the life of the Beast.
They were first introduced through Leah’s sister, Alma Hirsig. Alma was intensely interested in the occult, and wo
uld go on—in the 1920s—to become a disciple of a master named Pierre Bernard, who called himself “Oom the Omnipotent” and taught the members of his “Secret Order of Tantricks” a form of sexual magic. Alma served for a time as the “High Priestess of Oom” but later recanted and wrote, under the pseudonym Marion Dockerill, My Life in a Love Cult: A Warning to All Young Girls (1928). There are, of course, obvious parallels in the paths of Alma as High Priestess and Leah as Scarlet Woman. There may have been a contributory cause in the shared pattern of their upbringing, which included a physically abusive alcoholic father. The mother alone cared for nine children (six sisters, three brothers), ultimately fleeing with them to America to escape her husband’s tyranny. They settled in the Bronx, where both Alma and Leah came of age.
In the spring of 1918, Alma called on Crowley at his one-room studio at 1 University Place, bringing along her younger sister, Leah. On display for their viewing was a large triptych screen painted by Crowley himself—“my first attempt at painting in oil. The design was symbolic of the three principles, Sun, Moon and Agni (fire), of the Hindus.” These principles may also be viewed as depicting the formula and result of Crowley’s sexual magic. Crowley had begun, in the later years of the war, to devote himself seriously to painting, a discipline in which he had no formal training. He may have been encouraged here by a friend and disciple, Leon Kennedy, a painter in whose New York studio Crowley had lived for a time (after returning from New Orleans) in 1917. The frontispiece to the Blue Equinox is a painting by Kennedy—an idealized portrait of Crowley the Master in meditation. In furtherance of his new artistic career, Crowley placed an advertisement in a New York newspaper seeking highly particular types of models (thus showing the influence of British occult artist Austin Osman Spare, who often portrayed grotesques): “WANTED—DWARFS, Hunchbacks, Tattoed Women, Harrison Fisher Girls [of whom his former lover Jeanne Foster was the archetype], Freaks of All Sorts, Coloured Women, only if exceptionally ugly or deformed, to pose for artist.”
The ostensible purpose of this first visit by the Hirsig sisters to Crowley’s studio was for Alma to receive his advice on the proper choice of occult studies. But the meeting soon took a different turn. Here is Crowley’s account:
The ‘little sister’ reminded me of Solomon’s friend, for she had no breasts. She was tall and strangely thin, with luminous eyes, a wedge-like face, a poignant sadness and a sublime simplicity. She radiated an indefinable sweetness. Without wasting time on words, I began to kiss her. It was sheer instinct. She shared it and equalled my ardour. We continued with occasional interruptions, such as politeness required, to answer her sister in the rare intervals when she got out of breath.
Despite this erotically auspicious first encounter, some nine months would pass before Crowley and Leah Hirsig met again. In early January 1919, the Hirsig sisters paid a return call on Crowley. Again, he was distracted from the subject at hand: “While we talked, I took off her [Leah’s] clothes and asked her to come and pose for me when she felt inclined.”
On January 11, Leah Hirsig returned to Crowley’s studio—this time on her own. Crowley’s explanation for her visit in the Confessions, brief as it is, reveals the complex interweaving of passion, dependence, shame, and contempt that would mark his feelings for Hirsig throughout their years together: “(She swears I telephoned to ask her and perhaps I did. I have my moments of imbecile impulse. I undressed her again, but this time not with impunity.) To appease conscience I proceeded to make a sketch, a rough rude scrawl. I had never drawn from the nude before.” Crowley, the self-proclaimed shameless pagan, had never before—despite his previously quoted advertisement—brought himself to use an unclothed model in his painting.
Perhaps the sheer emotional difficulty of taking this step fueled what was to come—Crowley’s breakthrough as a painter of frightening passion, with the help of Hirsig, his new muse.
I was seized with a spasm of creative energy and all night long I splashed the central canvas with paint. When she took the pose I had asked her, “What shall I call the picture; what shall I paint you as?” She had said, “Paint me as a dead soul.” My screen is called Dead Souls.
She stood central, her head the keystone of the arch of monsters. Her face is ghastly green. Her fleshless body lustreless, white with grey-blue shadows beneath the ribs.[ … ]
Upon finishing the painting, he immediately consecrated Hirsig as his Scarlet Woman, painting the Mark of the Beast (the sun and moon conjoined) between her breasts. She took on the magical name Alostrael—the womb or grail of God (the Scarlet Woman in Revelation carries a grail filled with the blood of saints). Crowley also termed her the “Ape of Thoth” because, as the last of his female theriomorphic initiators into the grade of Magus, she translated “into action his thought or, in other words, is the instrument through which his idea assumes sensible form.”
Not long after this, Crowley and Hirsig moved into new lodgings together—an apartment at 63 Washington Square South, “a long and lofty room with three wide windows, looking out across the tree tops to the opening of Fifth Avenue.” It was here that, in February 1919, Crowley entertained a reporter from The New York Evening World—the same newspaper that had profiled him twice in 1914. The reporter described a lavish chez Crowley: “It is luxuriously fitted with cavernous easy chairs, mahogany davenports, expensive tapestries, a fine rug or two, an expensive and many-pillowed divan, with here and there a rare rosewood antique.” Where did the funds for all this come from? That remains a mystery. In interview, Crowley the painter distinguished himself sharply from the prevailing avant-garde outlooks, though his method showed obvious parallels with the then emerging Surrealist movement: “But please, whatever you do, don’t call me a cubist or a futurist or anything queer like that. I guess you might call me a subconscious impressionist or something on that order. My art is really subconscious and automatic.”
Hirsig’s lack of prudishness was one of her primary appeals for Crowley. According to Seabrook, who visited this lavish apartment, the living model for his dead souls was fond of going about naked within its confines, unembarrassed in the presence of visitors. Just where her son Hansi fit into this new and daring domestic arrangement is not clear. But the close presence of a baby boy may have spurred Crowley’s decision, in the summer of 1919, to carry out a new Great Magical Retirement. The camping site he chose was at the end of Long Island, in the vicinity of Montauk.
Little is known of this Retirement; Crowley’s diaries of this time have not survived. What is plain is that it was of short duration and that he regarded it as a failure—a confirmation that his magical current had run its course in America. Later that summer he paid a visit to Seabrook and his wife, Kate, at their home near Atlanta. Kate Seabrook became, briefly, a partner in sexual magic with Crowley. Seabrook himself seems not to have minded.
Crowley returned to London in late December, suffering from one of his recurrent bouts of asthma. Shortly after his arrival, a Harley Street physician prescribed heroin as a palliative both for the asthma and for Crowley’s increasingly severe bronchitis. Crowley had taken heroin intermittently in the past, but from this point onwards his use became an addiction—a humiliation for one who had long boasted that only weaklings fell victim to a drug.
But as the year came to a close, Crowley felt like anything but an addict. Rather, he was resolved to carry the campaign of Thelema back to Europe. Hirsig, who had become pregnant by Crowley in the spring, had voyaged to France with Hansi and was waiting for Crowley there. As for his own spiritual progress, there were still greater heights in sight. The grade of Ipsissimus, the exalted 10°=1□ vantage of Kether, the Crown, at the apex of the Tree of Life—this was Crowley’s aim. It would entail the transcendence of all categories of morality and reason. As he noted in his diary on December 26, 1919: “Attainment is Insanity. The whole point is to make it perfect in balance. Then it radiates light in every direction, while the Ipsissimus is utterly indifferent to it.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The Founding and the Ruin of the Abbey of Thelema (1920–23)
For the brief time that Crowley remained in London—just long enough to see in the New Year of 1920—he was not pursued by the British authorities for his alleged treason during the war. His diaries of this time betray no anxiety that this was likely to occur. But just after his departure for Paris on January 2, John Bull—the same tabloid that had, ten years earlier, excoriated Crowley and his Rites of Eleusis, lashed out again: “the war which brought out the best in human nature, also forced the scum to the top, and Aleister Crowley is of the scum.” The article concluded with a plea that the government take action against Crowley. In the Confessions, Crowley postured that the John Bull piece was too absurd to require a response. Privately, he felt it as an extreme humiliation that he lacked funds to wage legal battle.
Leah Hirsig joined him in Paris. She was now in the eighth month of her pregnancy, with her two-year-old son, Hansi, already under her care. But Hirsig had arrived at a practical solution. On board ship from America to Europe, she befriended a recently widowed woman, Ninette Shumway, herself the mother of a three-year-old boy, Howard. Shumway was twenty-five, twelve years younger than Hirsig, and had previously worked as a governess in America. Hirsig suggested that she take up the same work for Crowley and herself. Shumway accepted. By late February, Shumway had taken on the role of a second magical lover to Crowley (her magical name was “Sister Cypris,” after Aphrodite; her nickname was “Beauty”). Hirsig, however, remained the chief Scarlet Woman.
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