There were a number of individuals who passed through training of one sort or another at the Abbey—with markedly different impressions and results. One notable success story, from the perspective both of Crowley and of herself, was Jane Wolfe, who was forty-five at the time of her arrival in July 1920. Wolfe was an American who had carved out for herself a career as a character actress in Hollywood silent films. Having encountered Crowley’s writings, she began writing to him in 1919. When at last she journeyed to the Abbey in July 1920, Wolfe found it deplorably filthy and nearly despaired; but having come so far, she resolved to continue with her plan to study with Crowley. Continue she did, remaining at the Abbey for some three years and maintaining a lifelong relationship with Crowley as disciple and friend. As for the stench of the Abbey, she learned to bear it and at last to understand it. Thelemic historian Phyllis Seckler writes that, some years later, Wolfe broached the subject to another Crowley disciple, Norman Mudd (of whom more later), who explained that Crowley was exploring the “mystery of filth” along the lines expressed in one of his prewar holy books, The Book of the Heart Girt with a Serpent: “Thou strivest ever; even in thy yielding thou strivest to yield—and lo! thou yieldest not. Go thou unto the outermost places and subdue all things, Subdue thy fear and thy disgust. Then—yield!”
A more problematic disciple was Cecil Frederick Russell, a young American who had first been drawn to Crowley by his reading, back in 1917, of “The Revival of Magick” in The International. In June 1918 he paid a brief visit to Crowley at the latter’s West 9th Street apartment in New York. As Russell described the occasion in his autobiography, Znuz is Znees, “He [Crowley] answered my knock with a hypnotic stare & made an appointment for lunch. I remained most of the day; we took an astral journey together[ … ]” That evening, a group including Crowley and Hirsig initiated Russell as a III° in the O.T.O. Russell again met with Crowley in autumn 1918, and the two men stayed in intermittent correspondence, with Russell proving an ardent student of The Book of the Law.
Russell arrived at the Abbey on November 21, 1920, intent on personal study with the Master. But relations between the two were anything but smooth. Russell was bright, brash, vigorous, and the first male to join Crowley at the Abbey. Crowley sought to employ Russell as an aide in the exploration of the kabbalistic mysteries of the Book. Crowley was also attracted to Russell, while revulsed by the hold that this crude younger man had upon him. In addition to all this, there was Crowley’s desire to maintain authority as a teacher and Russell’s difficulty in accepting this authority as a matter of daily routine.
Shortly after Russell’s arrival, on November 27, Crowley commenced the Cephaloedium Working, Cephaloedium being the ancient Roman name for Cefalù. The central purpose of this working, which was carried out through intermittent sexual magic operations into January 1921, was “to establish the Book of the Law; in particular to finish the Comment [begun in 1919] & to publish the Book as therein commanded.” As for this Comment, while Crowley devoted much time in the coming year to a “New Version,” he remained dissatisfied with it. In this aim, the Working was a failure.
The tension between its three central participants—Crowley, Hirsig, and Russell—did not bode well for successful sexual magic. Russell’s principal magical name was Frater Genesthai (The flowers that come into being); but in his record of the Cephaloedium Working Crowley frequently inscribed Russell’s name as “Iacchaion” after the Greek Iacchus or Dionysius. As Crowley viewed the situation, Russell was to afford a Dionysian sexual ecstasy to the workings. In his diary entry for December 12, Crowley set forth both his diagnosis of Russell’s shallow innocence and the corresponding sexual plan of action:
He [Russell] want Pure Love, 17-years-old with real gold hair and the Ideal Ideal, and expects to pay Three Dollars for it, that being the recognized price all over the United States. The Passion of a Prostitute, the Vice of a Vampire, seem to him funny: how much more then the coprophilic and bestial joys of those who know—know all and delight in all, having achieved and experienced all [ … ]
This truth learn thou, Genesthai, brother of mine! Learn this, thou Bull in my Pasiphae-pasture! Learn thou that I, worn out with wallowing though I be, or seem to be to thee, can breed thee Minotaur, while those meek calves that tempt thee with soft comeliness will but give birth to their base kind, to kine potential of no more than milk, veal, beef, and leather. Come, brother, come, my Bull! Desire me thou, delight me! Defile me and destroy me; I swear to thee my Magick shall repay thy pains.
His resolution to seduce Russell survived even the premature end of the Cephaloedium Working on January 20, 1921—which Crowley blamed on the failure of Russell to maintain sufficient sexual energy. Some four months later, on May 10, he wrote:
Now I’ll shave and make up my face like the lowest kind of whore and rub on perfume and go after Genesthai like a drunken two-bit prick-pit in old New Orleans. He disgusts me sexually, and I him, as I suspect (bitcheroo, switcheroo!); the dirtier my deed, the dearer my darling will hold me; the grosser the act the greedier my arse to engulph him! It maddens me that I have always been so bashful and sheepish (or by reaction) absurdly overbold. But unless there is magnetism, it is impossible for me to unite with either woman or man.
Crowley was correct in suspecting that he disgusted Russell sexually. Russell left this account (utilizing Crowley’s personal homosexual pseudonym, Alys Cusack) of Crowley’s method of expressing his bisexuality in the Chambre des Cauchemars: “On the wall above the wide bed on the floor of the Cauchemars was a small plaque engraved with six words, the initial letter of the fourth was variable, it could be an N or an H: ‘ALYS CUSACK IS_OT AT HOME!’ Unfortunately for her, she was not my type [ … ]”
Russell departed the Abbey in the fall of 1921. His ultimate assessment of Crowley was a harsh one—hardly surprising, as Russell’s memoirs were written, in part, to counter the unflattering portrait of himself in Crowley’s Confessions. But Russell did strike at a central contradiction in Crowley—the conflict between the ambitious man of letters and the aspiring egoless Magus: “You see, Crowley was first, last and always an Author, a Litterateur; with this always in his mind is it any wonder his Magick sometimes did not achieve his anticipated results! Ever hunting the happy phrase, modeling the merriest metaphor—even while fucking he was recording the Opus in his mind rather than endeavoring to establish Ekagrata [focused energy] to effect Samadhi! Like a professional magician deceiving Destiny with misdirection not realising Fate was his own Higher Self.”
There was, in early 1921, a hiatus (February 1–April 6) during which Crowley left Russell, Hirsig, Wolfe, Shumway, and the children to tend to the Abbey while he paid an extended visit to Paris. A change of scene, pure and simple, was what he wanted most. Soon after his arrival, he became entangled in a love triangle with the added stakes of obtaining disciples for Thelema.
The married couple with whom Crowley became involved were the writer John William Navin Sullivan and his wife, Sylvia. Sullivan was a gifted polymath—a mathematician and music critic whose study Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (1927) remains a classic in its field. Sullivan was impressed by Crowley and went so far as to sign an Oath, witnessed by the Beast, to devote himself to the Great Work of discovering his own True Will. As for Sylvia Sullivan, she became Crowley’s lover—according to Crowley—in the same manner as had Ratan Devi, the wife of Ananda Coomaraswamy: Sullivan, as the bored husband, passed her on to the waiting Crowley, who desired her but would remain dispassionate in any possessive quarrels that ensued. Sullivan did soon succumb to a fit of jealousy, but relations between the two men were ultimately patched, though Sullivan abandoned any formal discipleship. The plans for the couple to come to Cefalù were abandoned. Crowley was rueful, not as to Sylvia, but as to the loss of her husband’s talents: “I could have made him the evangelist of Thelema; with his abilities he might have been more important in history than St. Paul.” Crowley blamed Sullivan’s sexual insecurities for the
failure; that his own sexual proclivities may have played an equal role did not occur to him.
Crowley returned to the Abbey in April and turned his energies to the artistic transformation of its walls and ceilings, previously described. This same spring, Crowley came to a resolution for which he had been bracing himself for some six years, since his assumption of the grade of Magus. His destiny was to evolve to the highest grade conceivable by human consciousness—that of Ipsissimus, 10°=1□, on the plane of Kether, the kabbalistic Crown of the Tree of Life, where the first emanation of pure Godhead is made manifest. Crowley’s diary entry on this new and final grade was as much terrified as exultant. The “deed” referred to is unknown:
I am by insight and initiation an Ipsissimus; I’ll face the phantasm of myself, and tell it so to its teeth. I will invoke Insanity itself; but having thought the Truth, I will not flinch from fixing it in word and deed, whatever come of it.
9:34 p.m. As a God goes, I go.
10:05 I am back at my desk, having done the deed, before the Scarlet Woman as my witness. I swore to keep silence, so long as I live, about the fact of my attainment. (The Scarlet Woman is not thus bound, of course.)
As to this vow of silence, Crowley seems to have been as good as his word. He never made direct mention of the Ipsissimus attainment in his writings. But in the private sanctity of the Abbey, Crowley had at last jumped the gap between God and himself.
He was well aware that it was only an aspect of himself—an accessible but extremely intermittent state of consciousness, one might say—that warranted the status of Ipsissimus. His relentless private analyses of the weakness of his human nature continued apace; the confines of the Abbey, and the influence of Hirsig, seemed to compel such introspection. There was a further stimulus as well. Crowley was beginning to utilize heroin with alarming regularity and in alarming quantities. He blamed any number of factors for this—the cold and gray of Paris and Cefalù, the bouts of asthma and dyspnoea from which he suffered, and from which heroin provided a respite. He tried to will himself free from physical dependence—this effort would occupy much of his energy in the year to come. He tried further to will himself to believe that this effort was succeeding even as his steady intake continued. Increasingly often, despite himself, he battled the bouts of despair of an addict.
In the spring and summer of 1921, the Abbey received a number of new visitors, straining its physical and economic resources to the limit. There was a brief visit paid, in April, by a Captain M. E. Townshend of the British Army. Townshend was a friend of Crowley’s old ally, J. F. C. Fuller, who had by this time been promoted to colonel and was serving in the War Office in London. Crowley yearned to impress Townshend, as Townshend had the ear of Fuller. Crowley himself had written to Fuller earlier this same year, declaring, with as much humility as Crowley would ever muster: “Your friendship stands out as the best thing in my life of that kind. We were mules to let envious monkeys manoeuvre us into dissension. I know it was mostly the fault of my silly pride. The Crowned Child needs a Warrior to command the armies of Liberty: thou art the man!” The letter was personally delivered to Fuller at the War Office, in an envelope that had become filthy in transit, by an emissary of Crowley who remains unknown. Fuller made no reply.
Nonetheless, Crowley made his best efforts to win over Captain Townshend, and to a certain extent he succeeded—a tribute to his charisma in a tawdry physical environment that could hardly have been impressive to a British officer, especially one familiar with Crowley’s propaganda efforts during the late war. In an April 17 letter to Fuller, Townshend transcribed an impassioned sermon delivered to him by Crowley:
“Do what you like,” he said, “not the haphazard wishes and desires of the conscious mind but the unchangeable idea of your inner self. You must dig down into that and find out what it is—drag it out into the daylight. You, like Fuller, are not living in accordance with your real will. You soldier to make a living, your real self remains unexpressed. Why do I have these erotic pictures? There, in the corner, are lesbians as large as life. Why do you feel shocked and turn away: or perhaps overtly turn to look again? Because, though you may have thought of such things, you have been afraid to face them. Drag all such thoughts into the light. If you stayed here for a little you would be like the others and notice nothing wrong.
Townshend declared to Fuller that he was deeply interested in getting to know Crowley better. But a prompt cabled reply by Fuller, which has not survived, quashed that notion. As Townshend declared in a responsive letter of April 28: “You have quite convinced me of the utter undesirability of visiting Cefalù.”
The first long-term guests at the Abbey, arriving at the end of June, were Mary Butts and Cecil Maitland, a romantic couple, both of whom were minor figures in the British literary world. Crowley met them during his winter stay in Paris and had invited them to come to the Abbey for instruction in magic, a subject in which both Butts and Maitland had already dabbled. They made the trip to Cefalù some months later and stayed the course of a trying three months of instruction at the Abbey.
It fascinated Crowley that Maitland was the son of an Anglican clergyman father who had converted to Catholicism. This set in motion a ritual specially devised by Crowley, three days after their arrival, to make use of Maitland’s background. This ritual featured the Cakes of Light specified by the warlike god Ra-Hoor-Khuit in The Book of the Law (III, 24–5): “The best blood is of the moon, monthly: then the fresh blood of a child, or dropping from the host of heaven: then of enemies; then of the priest or of the worshippers: last of some beast, no matter what. This burn: of this make cakes and eat unto me.” There is no evidence that Crowley ever used the fresh blood of a child or of an enemy in preparing the cakes. Indeed, in his comment on this verse, written during this period, Crowley was careful to specify that the “child” was “Babalon and the Beast conjoined”—that is, the elixir of sexual magic. Here is Crowley’s diary account of the ritual, which resembles in structure the frog crucifixion at Lake Pasquaney in 1916:
The ceremony of preparing the Cakes of Light. A young cock [ … ] is to be baptized Peter Paul into the Catholic Church by C.J.A. Maitland, the son of an apostate Romish Priest & therefore the ideal “Black” Hierophant. Mary [Butts] and I are its sponsors. Peter Paul as the founders of the Christian Church, & we want its blood to found our own church. Alostrael then dances against the will of Mary, on my swearing to give her the half of my Kingdom. She demands P.P.’s head on the Disk. I behead him, & the blood is caught in the silver ‘charger’ on the Disk. In this charger is the meal etc for the Cakes of Light, ready except for the blood. I conjure the spirit of P.P. to serve these cakes to found our Church with, as we may use them. The cock is slain in honour of Ra Hoor Khuit who is invoked before the killing.
Crowley biographer John Symonds records that Butts refused to partake, and that she remarked (after her return to London) that Crowley had offered her “a goat’s turd on a plate.” But her sarcasm came later. Butts’s diary confirms that, for much of their stay at the Abbey, she and Maitland were convinced of the value of its methods and worked intensively at their magical studies.
In late July, Crowley devised a “Seth ceremony” which called for the sacrifice of a virgin goat, the horns of which were to represent Aiwaz, and the blood of which would be employed for the Cakes of Light. Prior to the sacrifice, the goat was to be induced to have intercourse with Hirsig the Scarlet Woman, so that the drinking of its blood could be a true “drinking thereof from the Cup of our Lady of Whoredom.” The goat, however, refused to comply; somewhat later, the Beast himself engaged in sexual magic with the Scarlet Woman to remedy the omission. But the ritual proceeded on course, with the sacrifice carried out. According to a later account of this ritual by Butts, Hirsig—her bare back covered with goat’s blood after the Beast had slit its throat—had asked Butts, “‘What shall I do now?’ And Mary had replied, ‘I’d have a bath if I were you.’”
Butts and Maitland r
eturned to London in mid-September, their three-month course completed. They would later claim that their time at the Abbey had injured their health and instilled a drug habit in them both. For his part, Crowley would acknowledge the editorial help Butts gave him, during her stay, with his work-in-progress manuscript of Magick in Theory and Practice. In November 1922, Butts would offer highly caustic comments on Crowley to the London Sunday Express—thus contributing to a new wave of press attacks.
There were still further visitors to the Abbey that summer. Frank Bennett, a fifty-three-year-old Australian bricklayer, arrived on July 17 and remained for some four months, thriving under Crowley’s teachings. Bennett had first learned of Crowley’s teachings back in 1909, while living in London, through his readings in The Equinox. Thereafter, Bennett—not yet having met Crowley personally—joined the A∴A∴ and took the magical name Frater Progradior (“I Progress”); he later joined the O.T.O., then emigrated to Australia. Crowley ultimately summoned him to the Abbey. Bennett, determined to conquer the blockage to his spiritual progress, made the lengthy voyage.
By the time Bennett left Cefalù he had attained to the 6°=5□ Adeptus Major grade in the A∴A∴ and an exalted IX° in the O.T.O. The latter degree, which signified an intimate knowledge of the transcendental powers of sexuality, addressed precisely the issue that had puzzled Bennett most upon arrival. For Bennett had long suffered from head pains and auditory inner voices—symptoms which indicated, he believed, an inner complex that required healing. During this summer with Crowley, the healing occurred. Crowley told of the day when he and Bennett walked toward the beach “and just as we reached the edge of the cliff above the bay I made some casual remark which proved a winning shot.” In essence, Crowley explained that the discovery of one’s true will was based largely on freeing the desires of the subconscious mind from the strictures of the conscious mind. In particular, the strictures placed upon sexual expression were destructive because the phallus was, both symbolically and functionally, the microcosmic human manifestation of the power of divine creation. For Bennett, these insights confirmed the emphatic insistence of Thelema on true will being “the whole of the Law.” This epiphany brought a consequent sense of increased physical well-being. After completing a solitary magical retirement on the Rock, Bennett returned to Australia in late 1921.
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