Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  Crowley was suddenly the paterfamilias and chief means of support for two women, their two sons, and the baby on the way. He had obtained some funds while in London (roughly £3000 in inheritances from various deceased aunts), and so had means for the time being. Deciding that a rural setting would best suit the needs of all, Crowley leased a house at 11 bis rue de Neuville in Fontainebleau, where they remained through early March. It was a time of seclusion and happiness. Crowley gave Hansi and Howard—whom he nicknamed “Dionysus” and “Hermes”—their first lessons in rock climbing. As they were mere toddlers, the ascents he chose must have been mercifully short. But the attitude Crowley displayed here was typical. Under his Thelemic creed, children were to be raised with full freedom to explore their talents and interests. Parents—especially mothers—were to refrain from fussing and over-protecting. The absence of hovering care, Crowley believed, could reduce the impact of the Freudian Oedipal complex, the remnants of which Crowley abhorred in himself.

  On February 20, Leah gave birth to a daughter whom they named Anne Léa (the initials AL signifying “God” and adding to thirty-one, the key number of The Book of the Law); her less daunting nickname was Poupée. Crowley thought it best to send Hirsig and the baby to London for some weeks, perhaps to obtain medical care for the frail newborn. As for Crowley, Shumway, and the two boys, they began looking for a more affordable haven than Fontainebleau. On March 1, Crowley consulted the I Ching; the oracle gave a favorable reading for Cefalù, a small town on the northern coast of Sicily.

  By April 1 they arrived in Cefalù—a town of fishermen and cobbled streets which had retained much of its medieval architecture, including a magnificent Norman cathedral. They spent a ghastly first night in a seedy hotel. But the very next day they found the perfect house to lease. The Villa Santa Barbara was located on the southeastern outskirts of the town—an unprepossessing but solidly built one-story house, with thick plaster walls and a tiled roof. From its front door there was a view of the great Rock that overlooks Cefalù and the Mediterranean, on the heights of which are the remains of ancient Roman temples.

  All of this was most pleasing to Crowley. The day they moved in, he made his first ascent of the Rock—an arduous hike which offered the reward of a breathtaking vista of his new realm. As he exulted in his diary: “Traversed Rock of Cefalù, visiting Temples of Jupiter and Diana. At supper, I ate much thigh of kid, and may Priapus [the Roman phallic god] prosper!” The continued investigation of sexual magic was one of the central purposes that Crowley had in mind for his stay in the villa, which he would soon come to regard as the New Aeon realization of the Abbey of Thelema first imagined by Rabelais.

  Shortly after the arrival of Hirsig and Poupée on April 14, Crowley entered into a formal lease with the Italian owner of the villa, which Crowley signed as “Sir Alastor de Kerval.” Hirsig followed suit with “Contessa Lea Harcourt.” In like manner, Crowley devised a more dignified name for the Abbey itself. He had cards and stationery printed on which his address included the designation “Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum.” This referred to a training ground—a “College of the Holy Spirit”—for disciples who demonstrated their resolve by making their way to Cefalù. Through them he would found the New Aeon; they would aid the Magus as the apostles had aided Jesus. Among the regular residents of the Abbey, there emerges a more homely nickname for the villa—the “horsel,” a contracted form of “Whore’s Cell,” with reference to the magical practices that occurred within.

  In the months that followed, Crowley undertook a substantial redecoration of the villa’s interior. The basic layout featured five rooms radiating off a central chamber. This allowed for adequate bedroom and kitchen space, with the central chamber converted into a temple. In its center stood a six-sided altar, in which were kept the traditional implements and weapons of magic—the sword, dagger, cup, lamen, bell, and so forth. On top of the altar, surrounded by six candles, was The Book of the Law.

  The Temple was the first of the interior rooms of the villa to be converted. But in the spring of 1921—a year after their arrival—the other rooms of the Abbey were also transformed pursuant to Crowley’s vision. He was inspired by the example of Paul Gauguin, an exile from his native France (in Tahiti as opposed to Cefalù) who had created works of art glorifying his vision. Crowley now viewed Gauguin as a precursor-saint of Thelema (inserting his name into the Gnostic Mass) and followed Gauguin’s example by filling the Abbey with his canvases and then painting—with the help of his disciples—extensive murals on the walls, the doors, and even the shutters.

  The bedroom that Crowley shared with Hirsig (Shumway was a frequent guest nonetheless) he named “Le Chambre des Cauchemars”—The Room of Nightmares. It was on the walls of this room that Crowley the artist created his masterpiece—an astonishing montage (as revealed by photographs taken in the 1950s by Kenneth Anger) of unbridled sexuality, blasphemy, poetry, and magical prophecy. Crowley went so far as to write up a descriptive brochure in the hopes of drumming up a tourist trade—which never materialized—to pay to see the Chambre. (Ironically, a recent Cefalù tourist brochure featured the Abbey and a sample of Crowley’s art.)

  On the main wall of the Chambre was a tableau entitled “HELL—La Nature Malade” which included, as a centerpiece, a leering portrait of a red-lipped Hirsig and a quotation from the poem “Leah Sublime,” an homage to the Scarlet Woman composed by Crowley in June 1920: “Stab your demoniac smile to my brain,/ Soak me in cognac, cunt, and cocaine.” In his brochure, Crowley urbanely explained the theme of this painting: “The general idea is to present a variety of natural objects in such form and colour as is most antipathetic to their qualities. All we see depends on our senses: suppose they lie to us? Remember that as soon as you perceive the actual conditions of consciousness, there is no such thing as TRUTH.[ … ] What we call ‘God’ may be only our diseased delirium-phantom, and His reality the one-eyed rotten-toothed petrifaction of Malice shewn in the picture.”

  A selection from the titles chosen by Crowley give a sense of the impact of the Chambre, which in its various paintings depicted the three realms of Heaven, Hell, and Earth: Four degenerates between Christian and Jew at prayer. (Crowley’s comment: “Men worship only their own weaknesses personified. ‘Hell’ is based upon false intellectual and moral consciousness.”) Japanese Devil-boy Insulting Visitors. (“Each soul has its own Special Means of Grace.”) The Sea-Coast of Tibet; Egyptian Aztecs arriving from Norway. (“You never know in how strange a world you live and what strange things may come to you.”) The Devil our Lord. (“The Sacred Symbols—the Horns of Power, the Egg of Purity, Safety and Life, etc.—exist in the most terrifying appearances. Everything that is, is holy.”) Other titles: The Long-Legged Lesbians; Tahitian Girl and her Eurasian Lover; Pregnant Swiss Artist Holding Young Crocodile; Morbid Hermaphrodite from Basutoland.

  The brochure raptly assured potential visitors—from whom Crowley hoped to draw new disciples—that the purpose of the Chambre “is to pass students of the Sacred Wisdom through the ordeal of contemplating every possible phantom which can assail the soul. Candidates for this initiation are prepared by a certain secret process before spending the night in this room; the effect is that the figures on the walls seem actually to become alive, to bewilder and obsess the spirit that has dared to confront their malignity.” This “secret process” may have included one or more drugs. Opium, ether, cocaine, heroin, laudanum, hashish, and anhalonium were in constant supply at the Abbey, and Crowley administered them to himself in the Chambre on an almost nightly basis. The brochure described, in the third person, the self-purgation that Crowley pursued in the Abbey:

  Those who have come successfully through the trial say that they have become immunized from all possible infection by those ideas of evil which interfere between the soul and its divine Self. Having been forced to fathom the Abysses of Horror, to confront the most ghastly possibilities of Hell, they have attained permanent mastery of their minds. The process is sim
ilar to that of “Psycho-analysis”; it releases the subject from fear of Reality and the phantasms and neuroses thereby caused, by externalizing and thus disarming the spectres that lie in ambush for the Soul of Man.

  It was to this end—the creation of a “divine Self” fully released from the fears and inhibitions of the all-too-human soul—that Crowley created the images of the Chambre des Cauchemars, as well as the self-prescribed magical ordeals that were his chief focus in the summer of 1920. As he noted time and again in his diary, Crowley felt himself deeply flawed by his lingering puritanism and sense of sin—discriminations that went against the essence of The Book of the Law. To liberate himself, Crowley turned to Hirsig in her role as Alostrael, the Scarlet Woman, the shameless Whore to his Beast. Never before had Crowley mated with a Scarlet Woman who could so challenge him. Hirsig became, in this summer marked by incessant drug use (predominantly cocaine and heroin), the psychopomp who would compel Crowley to pass through the worst of his fears. Hirsig was, Crowley realized, the quintessential embodiment of his own teaching and guidance:

  When first I found Her, She was a woman, one that held godhead [ … ] She had ripe womanhood, wrapping her in Motherhood’s blouse, in Intellect’s shawl, in Passion’s slattern skirt, and Human Loving-kindness perched on Her head, a dove’s wing with an eagle’s feather trimming the toque’s soft straw.

  Now I, the God, have choked Her god in dung and bred the Basilisk, reared the fiend, Satan-Alostrael, to burn in hell with me—to burn, to writhe, to exult, to spend, to be, to will, to go, to change, to lust, to create life, to kindle love, to unveil light, to unleash liberty, my Word and Law Thelema to proclaim, to ’stablish and to execute for ever. To build that Law into Man’s Soul, as Nature builds a man from the fifth primate, is Her Satan-secret Asp-brew in Her Cup’s Blood (Filth, Madness, Poison, Inchantment, Putrefaction): it aids Intoxication and its One Mystery of Mysteries, Initiation.

  His arduous initiation—erotic and magical—through the summer of 1920 was the first time in Crowley’s life that the ritual ordeals of an exalted magical grade were presided over not by himself but by a resolute other. On July 22 the Beast swore an oath of obedience to his Scarlet Woman: “She is to direct all action, taking the initiative throughout.” That very day the first ordeal was administered. Crowley, taking the feminine persona of “Alys” (a name he also used when acting out his homosexual nature), made love in the role of Hirsig’s lesbian slave. He described this coupling as “a frightful ordeal of cruelty and defilement” which “revolted even my own body, and made me free forever of my preference for matter, made me Pure Spirit.”

  Under the guidance of the Scarlet Woman, every fear to which Crowley had clung became, in this realm, fiercely exposed. To be sure, this process often dovetailed nicely with the sadomasochism that was, by Crowley’s own admission, a strong component of his nature. It seems to have been so with Hirsig as well. Consider this diary entry of July 26, which tells of how the Scarlet Woman and the Beast administered pain:

  She discovered the physical cowardice and dread of pain which I had sunk so deep by means of daring death-mountains, wild beasts, poison, and disease. She held a lighted cigarette against my breast. I shrank and moaned. She spat her scorn, and puffed at it and put it back. I shrank and moaned. She made me fold my arms, sucked at the paper till the tobacco crackled with the fierceness of its burning; she put it back for the third time. I braced myself; I tightened lip and thrust my breast against it.

  That very same day, Leah pressed on to a still more wrenching ordeal. This time the weakness in Crowley to be excoriated was his tendency toward “Bluff”—more bluntly, his frequent and elaborate lying. In his diary, Crowley offered telling examples of this. There was his pretence to multilingual scholarship, when, by his own account, he possessed little knowledge of any foreign tongue but French—in which he was barely passable. There was his tendency to boast of his wickedness and of the number of his mistresses. As for the legend of his sexual stamina, Crowley confessed that “my secret is not vigor; I’ve the cheap cunning of the prostitute who saves herself [withholds orgasm], and loves her nightly score or so with no more effort than if she had cracked so many nuts.”

  Worst of all, however, was his boasting over his magical prowess. It had been Crowley’s claim to Hirsig that his magic was capable of transcending all material distinctions, to the point that he could consume human excrement as an ingredient of the “cakes of light” prescribed by The Book of the Law. On the same July 26 as he endured the cigarette on his breast, he consumed the shit of the Scarlet Woman as the Thelemic Host:

  Then I obeyed. My mouth burned; my throat choked; my belly retched; my blood fled wither who knows, and my skin sweated. She stood above me hideous in contempt; she fixed snake’s eyes on mine, and with most patient discipline, as with most eager passion, as with sublime delight, was face to face with me, epiphany of my duty’s archetype. Hierophantia stood She, Her eyes uttering Light, Her mouth radiant Silence. She ate the Body of God, and with Her soul’s compulsion made me eat. [ … ]My teeth grew rotten, my tongue ulcered; raw was my throat, spasm-torn my belly, and all my Doubt of that which to Her teeth was moonlight, and to her tongue ambrosia; to her throat nectar, in Her Belly the One God of whose Pure Body She should fresh Her Blood.

  Hirsig, as described in these diary passages, seems a primordial earth goddess without shame or fear. But human she was, as fully human as Crowley himself. The weaknesses that would torment her during this year had to do, first, with jealousy over the primacy of her role as Scarlet Woman. This jealousy does not seem to have been extreme; Hirsig tolerated, for example, Crowley’s intermittent homosexual liaisons with male prostitutes in Palermo, the Sicilian city to which he would journey by train now and then, as a way of breaking up the Abbey routine. But the presence of Shumway was far more threatening; strains mounted between the two women. These were exacerbated by Hirsig’s terrible misfortunes as a mother. Shortly after the birth of Poupée in February 1920, Hirsig became pregnant again. So did Shumway. Crowley was awaiting two babies from two different mothers. Meanwhile Poupée, “first bastard” of the Beast and the Scarlet Woman, remained in poor health through the summer and early fall. Crowley felt his helplessness, as in this April 1920 diary entry:

  I have been howling like a mad creature nearly all day. I want my epitaph to be ‘Half a woman made with half a god’. It is not My Will to save my baby’s life. What is ‘mine’? Not to save all the babies in the world, as I should do if I started to save one. My Will is to be the Logos of the Aeon; I am Thelema. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Beyond that, I am more helpless than the veriest quack magician.

  On October 14, 1920, Poupée died in a hospital in Palermo. Crowley may never have grieved so deeply as he did for her; his Confessions are replete with that pain. Hirsig was devastated as well; six days later, Hirsig miscarried. The loss of two children in the face of Shumway’s healthy pregnancy proved unbearable. Hirsig became convinced that Shumway had worked a black magical current that caused the deaths of the two children. She persuaded Crowley to review Shumway’s magical diaries for the period. (All members of the Abbey kept such accounts to chart their spiritual progress.) Upon doing so, Crowley was “utterly appalled at the horrors of the human heart. I never dreamed such things were possible. I am physically sick—it is the greatest shock of my life. I had this mess in my own circle. It poisoned my work; it murdered my children.” On November 5, he ordered Shumway banished. In Cefalù, Shumway gave birth to a daughter, Astarte Lulu Panthea; by November 26—whether out of forgiveness or practical need—she and her baby returned to the Abbey, where she resumed her role as nanny. Soon afterwards, Crowley leased a hut downhill from the Abbey to serve as a nursery, naming it, alternately, “The Umbilicus” and “Under the Hill” (after the erotic novel by Aubrey Beardsley).

  One might imagine that, given the intensity of the passions within the Abbey, the added burden of housing and training new disciples would ha
ve been unthinkable. But Crowley intended the Abbey to serve as a beacon to those who would live the true life of Thelema, and none who came to live and study there were turned away. This proved, most often, to be an economic burden for Crowley. The guests would sometimes offer funds (the formal fee requested was fifty guineas in advance, for an expected stay of three months), but in certain cases Crowley himself paid for their food and housing costs. The results he attained as a teacher were uneven, but the sincerity he brought to the task cannot be questioned. Crowley yearned to train new souls in the ways of Thelema, just as his father Edward had yearned to bring new believers into the Brethren sect.

  Early on, Crowley created a basic daily ritual framework that was to be followed by all Abbey residents. In the morning came the recitation of the brief “Adoration of the Sun” from Crowley’s Liber Resh: “Hail unto Thee, who art Ra in Thy Rising.” Other gods of the Egyptian solar pantheon were employed when this prayer was repeated at noon (Hathoor), eveningtime (Tum), and midnight (Khephra). There were also frequent services in the Abbey temple, in which Crowley’s Gnostic Mass and other of his rites were performed. In the temple, the men wore blue robes with hoods lined with red, the women blue robes with hoods lined with gold.

  The pattern of Abbey life for students, aside from the ritual practices outlined above, was to be (in Crowley’s ideal scheme of things, though never carried out precisely in practice with any student) as follows: The training time frame would be just over three months. There would be an initial three days during which one was treated graciously as a guest, with an orientation on Abbey life. After this, one was either to leave or set to work. If the latter choice was made, there would be a day of silence, followed by three days of instruction, and then the taking of a solemn Magical Oath to pursue the Great Work pursuant to the teachings of Crowley’s A∴A∴. The remaining weeks were devoted principally to the study of Crowley’s writings, as well as careful yogic and magical practice (all to be carefully recorded in a diary, which was to be left available for others in the Abbey to read, so that all could learn from each other’s work) and manual labor essential to Abbey functions—everything from cooking and shopping to the typing out of Crowley’s manuscripts. As for recreation, the Thelemites frequently shocked the Cefalù natives by their preference for nude bathing. Crowley also trained Abbey members in the basics of climbing on the great Rock.