This letter was couched to stimulate increased financial support from Yorke in London. But Crowley was serious enough to have had a formal will drawn up, three days earlier, which named Yorke as his executor to distribute his estate (which did not exist, but for unsaleable books and manuscripts) for the joint benefit of Busch and his eleven-year-old daughter, Astarte Lulu Panthea. Crowley’s requested terms for his burial are a grandiloquent testimony to the lasting impact upon him of the Rosicrucian teachings of the Golden Dawn, coupled with a sly wink at his own literary aspirations, which included the fantasy of burial in the “Poet’s Corner” of England’s most famous church:
I direct my Executor to take the necessary steps to ensure that my body is embalmed in the ancient Egyptian fashion and then treated as nearly as possible like that of Christian Rosencreutz as described in my book The Equinox Volume 1 Nr. 3 but if my body be disfigured, damaged or mutilated then I direct my Executor to have it cremated and the ashes preserved in an Urn and kept as stated in The Equinox I.v. Supplement. The place should be either (a) the broad ledge on the cliff behind Boleskine House, Scotland (b) the top of the rock at Cefalù, Sicily, about the “Bath of Diana”, (c) Westminster Abbey.
But Crowley did live on, and relations with Busch continued in their turbulent manner through the spring of 1932. The Beast suffered from bouts of asthma (for relief from which he turned to heroin) through the winter and underwent painful nasal surgery to improve his breathing. Busch traveled to London in May; Crowley hoped that she might succeed in raising funds from Yorke and others. Such was not the case. After she phoned from London, Crowley wrote of their talk: “Bill half insane with pain & worry.” Shortly thereafter, Crowley was ejected from the latest in a series of Berlin flats for nonpayment of rent. He was compelled at last to return—on June 22—to England.
Crowley solicited enough funds from personal connections to lease a new flat at 27 Albemarle Street in July. During that month, he again tried to raise interest in British publishers for projects including his Confessions and a prospective book (never written) on his experiences in Berlin. He consulted on this score with Regardie, who had, ironically, excelled his teacher in his ability to place magical works with British publishing houses. Regardie had, by this point, moved on to independent studies in the Golden Dawn tradition, though he dedicated his first two books, A Garden of Pomegranates (1932) and The Tree of Life (1932), to Crowley, the latter in the form of a disciple’s farewell addressed to one of the Beast’s poetic pseudonyms: “Dedicated with poignant memory of what might have been to Marsyas.” As Regardie freely admitted, both books drew heavily from Crowley’s teachings.
According to Regardie, he and Crowley “merely drifted apart” during this period. But wounds had been left to fester. Five years later, in 1937, Regardie sent Crowley a copy of a recent work, accompanied by a friendly note. Crowley replied with a mocking letter including an anti-Semitic jibe over the new first name of “Francis” (after St. Francis) which Regardie had adopted. Angered, Regardie fired back a missive which began: “Darling Alice, You really are a contemptible bitch!” This derisive allusion to Crowley’s homosexuality was, to the Beast, an unforgivable insult. In the fall of that year, Crowley circulated an anonymous, libelous letter laced with vitriol and evidencing special resentment over the borrowings made by Regardie for his books. Regardie, Crowley claimed, had “betrayed, robbed and insulted his benefactor.” The letter anguished Regardie at the time; but he came to forgive his teacher. Some thirty years later, Regardie, by then a respected elder statesman of the occult world, would seek to defend the Beast’s reputation in The Eye in the Triangle (1970). Near the end of his life (Regardie died in 1985), he said of Crowley, “Everything I am today, I owe to him.”
In July 1932, Crowley visited the Colney Hatch asylum, in hopes of persuading de Miramar to execute a document that would grant him a divorce and waive any claims for support. But no meeting between husband and wife occurred. According to Crowley, one of her attending physicians “advised me to leave Marie severely alone. He agreed that the case is hopeless.” For some reason, Busch had accompanied Crowley on this visit and “insisted on making rows” and “[s]creamed in street.” Crowley’s response was to take a horrified Busch on a guided tour through the Colney Hatch environs: “So showed her two other ladies doing it. One specialized in ‘fucking old piss-hole’ the other ‘fucking old shit-bag.’ Edifying.” But the Beast was beginning to despair of his Scarlet Woman. “I’m sorry: but I can no longer stand her constant nagging & abuse & idiot jealousy,” he avowed in a diary entry that summer. The relationship continued, albeit on a downward slope.
Crowley did achieve one small step toward public respectability during this time. Christina Foyle, proprietress of the famous Foyle’s Bookshop in London, invited Crowley to be the guest-of-honor speaker at a “Foyle’s Literary Luncheon” on September 15. A number of well-known British authors—and even clergymen—had addressed these occasions in the past. Crowley’s invitation evoked no outrage from the tabloids; by all accounts, his talk on “The Philosophy of Magick” was well-attended and well-received by an audience of several hundred persons at Grosvenor House. The memoirist Viola Banks, who sat at Crowley’s right hand during the luncheon, recalled: “At the end of the luncheon a queue of people, mostly women anxious to be presented to him, approached with autograph books to meet the poet whom John Bull described as ‘The Worst Man in England.’”
Crowley also delivered, on October 5, 1932, a speech to the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, entitled “The Elixir of Life: Our Magical Medicine.” Crowley was invited to speak by Harry Price, then the most famous researcher of paranormal phenomena in England. Crowley’s speech on this occasion was more erudite than his Foyle’s talk, though he stopped short—pursuant to his magical oath—of explicitly mentioning sexual magic or detailing its practices. (In an advertisement distributed by Crowley during this same year, there was the same approach—a guarded allusion to “a method of restoring youth and energy” that was “the principal secret of the O.T.O.”) The irony is that Crowley received far less publicity for these appearances than he did for being banned from speaking at Oxford two years earlier. As Crowley, in his advertisement, had set a rather lordly sum of 100 guineas per month for the “A.M.R.I.T.A.” treatment, he could have used publicity of any sort to attract clients. The seriousness of his business intentions was underscored by his purchase of a pill-making machine to produce the elixir. But sales were minimal.
On the very day that Crowley spoke at Foyle’s, Gerald Yorke departed for China and the Far East on an extended trip that would serve as an effective break from his “disciple” relationship with Crowley. Yorke had come to realize that “the Old Sinner” would find a way to survive with or without him. Yorke’s departure was hastened by Crowley’s decision, on September 6, to file a legal action against him. The grounds were mismanagement of Crowley’s literary properties and financial assets. Yorke later summarized the suit with terse sarcasm: “He writted me for the £40,000 he would have made had I not been his trustee.” But Crowley had no funds to pursue the action, and it was ultimately forgotten by both men in the interests of friendship.
Yorke’s departure left Crowley without a single trusted disciple in England. As for Busch, Crowley had grown disgusted with her bouts of drunkenness; though one must remember that it is Crowley’s voice, and not Busch’s, that survives to tell of these times. In February 1933, Crowley took on a new lover—Marianne, from Bulgaria, whom he declared “the most marvellous fuckstress alive.” By March, Busch’s reign as Scarlet Woman was over.
Crowley took on a number of female lovers during the winter and spring of 1933, but designated none as the new Scarlet Woman. These women were passionate media for his magical workings, no more and no less. The most frequent object of these workings during this period was personal rejuvenation—to offset recurrent bouts of asthma and bronchitis and, of course, the onset of old age. Crowley was approaching sixty.
He continued to pay calls upon a variety of London acquaintances whom he hoped to transform into benefactors. One such was Nancy Cunard, the wealthy shipping-line heiress and patroness of the avant-garde. Cunard did not fund Crowley, but the two did become friends. Cunard invited Crowley, in April 1933, to contribute to a broadside she was publishing on behalf of the “Scottsboro Boys”—nine young black men falsely accused and convicted of raping two white women by an all-white jury in Alabama. His statement, signed “Aleister Crowley, Scientific Essayist,” read: “This case is typical of the hysterical sadism of the American people—the result of Puritanism and the climate.”
The heart of the matter—racism—was absent from Crowley’s assessment. Perhaps this was because Crowley embodied the contradiction that writhed within many Western intellectuals of the time: deeply held racist viewpoints courtesy of their culture, coupled with a fascination with people of color. On April 10, Crowley attended a London demonstration on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, but his delight in the occasion was not based upon politics: “Great Public Meeting to protest against the Scottsborough [sic] Outrage turned to African Rally 8 P.M. It would have been a perfect party if the lads had brought their razors! I danced with many whores—all colours.”
In early August, the Beast met Pearl Brooksmith, a tall, thin middle-class English woman in her thirties with angular features that were—to judge from surviving photographs—reminiscent of Leah Hirsig. The Beast seems to have swept her off her feet. Certainly, his reputation had preceded him. “She was staggered when I told her my name,” Crowley duly recorded. Six days later, they had their first sexual working together. By August 18, Crowley had penned his first bawdy “Epitaph” to her:
Here lies a Pearl of women
Who lived in open sin.
One end collected semen,
The other guzzled gin.
On September 1, Brooksmith was consecrated as the new Scarlet Woman. With the onset of autumn, however, discord arose. Crowley, who required Brooksmith’s menstrual blood to create the type of Elixir to which he applied the alchemical term “Red Gold,” now accused her of holding back—whether psychologically or physically is not clear: “Told her we must cut out [workings] unless she was prepared to play up to her body (& also to avoid confusion). She said yes: ‘all great Saviours have been bastards.’” Matters were ironed out, and the workings continued with renewed intensity in November. The effects of the Elixirs they obtained varied considerably. On November 14, after a working performed with the aim of “Health,” Crowley noted: “Remarkable success—woke up utterly fit. But El. only works for a short spasm on bodies not properly purified: hence some relapse later—after I had started long walk.” But by December 5, Crowley’s doubts had grown after their sixty-eighth working in some four months: “S.W. goes on prolonged wild visions, very uncontrolled, & is near the border-line. I don’t like it too well.”
The Beast concluded his diary for the year 1933 with a poem to the Scarlet Woman (Brooksmith’s initials—“P.E.B.”—include her middle name of Evelyn) that well-reflected the bouts they had undergone together:
Bitched buggered & bewildered P.E.B.
Fucked frittered & frustrated
Crashed cuntstruck & confuted
Poxed petrified & putrid.
Alongside this poem, there is an epigram concerning another of Crowley’s great concerns—making financial ends meet. “The Gods,” he wrote, “have forbidden only one use for money: to count it.” The Beast demanded a standard of living that was, if not luxurious, then capricious and indulgent—pleasures of the finest order to be obtained whenever possible, without regret. Though he did not “count” his funds, he was not impervious to greed. It was this weakness that led him to a legal debacle in April 1934—a libel trial against his old acquaintance Nina Hamnett. The costs of the suit would cast Crowley into bankruptcy, and the publicity surrounding it would add a taint of ridicule to his notoriety.
Hamnett and Crowley first met in prewar London, when she won renown as the model for the sculpture “Laughing Torso” by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Hamnett was also a talented painter—and Crowley employed her as a muralist for his prewar studio at 124 Victoria Street. Hamnett, in turn, admired Crowley’s magical knowledge sufficiently to enroll as a member of the A∴A∴ in 1913, though she never seriously pursued its course of studies. It was Hamnett who first discovered, in 1912, the dead body of her friend Joan Hayes (a.k.a. Ione de Forest), the mistress of Victor Neuburg who had committed suicide—a suicide in which Crowley was frequently implicated by rumor. Further, while Hamnett and Crowley never had an affair (his own written list of female lovers confirms this), Crowley nonetheless “claimed to have been to bed with her, and was very rude about the experience,” according to Constantine Fitzgibbon, a friend of Hamnett. Whether this indicated attraction—or merely braggadocio—on Crowley’s part is unclear. In any event, the two maintained pleasant relations for over two decades, socializing in Paris during the 1920s.
When the British publisher Constable and Company issued her memoir, Laughing Torso, in 1932, Hamnett sent a letter to Crowley—who was mentioned in a number of its pages—to explain: “I have written quite a lot about you, very nice and appreciative. No libel, no rubbish, simply showing up the sale bourgeois attitude to all our behaviour.” Crowley showed no acrimony to Hamnett in person; but in his diary, the Beast was bellicose. “Abominable libels,” he wrote upon his first perusal of Laughing Torso in September 1932. Crowley was in a litigious mood at this point, having just filed the action against Yorke, previously discussed, for trustee mismanagement. He consulted with his solicitors about the libels in Laughing Torso; though they had their misgivings, given the vast potential for rebuttal evidence against the character of their client, their recommendation was to proceed.
The passage upon which the claim of libel would be based was innocuous enough, given the history of past press invective against the Beast, not to mention the accounts in Betty May’s ghostwritten Tiger-Woman (1929). Hamnett briefly described the “dreadful stories of his wickedness” that had circulated in 1920s Paris: “Crowley had a temple in Cefalù in Sicily. He was supposed to practice Black Magic there, and one day a baby was said to have disappeared mysteriously. There was also a goat there. This all pointed to Black Magic, so people said, and the inhabitants of the village were frightened of him.” The two libels Crowley would press were that he practiced black magic and that a baby had disappeared from the Abbey. The former, with its breadth of interpretive context, would prove his undoing.
Crowley commenced proceedings against Hamnett and her publisher in September 1932, demanding a restraining order against further publication of the book. No such order was granted, and the libel action proper came to trial in April 1934. In that interim, Crowley enjoyed a legal success that must have buoyed his confidence. In January 1933, he spied a placard in a bookshop window on Praed Street in London. The placard was attached to a copy of Crowley’s novel Moonchild and declared—as a sales enticement—that “Aleister Crowley’s first novel The Diary of a Drug Fiend was withdrawn from circulation after an attack in the sensational press.” Crowley sued for libel, on the particular grounds that Drug Fiend had never been removed from circulation (though sales had certainly suffered) and on the general grounds that the placard implied that his works were indecent. The one-day trial took place on May 10, 1933; Crowley was awarded £50 plus costs. Mr. Justice Bennett, who presided, ruled that: “There was not the smallest ground for suggesting that any book Mr. Crowley had written was indecent or improper. Mr. Gray [the bookshop owner] wanted the public to believe that the book to which the label was attached was an indecent book.”
Of course, Mr. Gray had not the means to hire counsel of the caliber available to Constable and Hamnett. Further, Mr. Gray had not introduced into evidence works by Crowley that could have substantiated that indecencies existed in his writings. Suddenly, libel actions seemed to the Beast a means to easy money. In June 1933, Crowl
ey contemplated, in addition to his pending action against Hamnett, a suit against memoirist Ethel Mannin, who wrote in her Confessions and Impressions (1930) of asking Crowley’s friend, society hostess Gwendolyn Otter, if “she could tell me the truth about him and the dark stories of drugs and black mass circulating about him [ … ]” Crowley’s interest in this passage confirms his intended strategy of suing on the basis of vague allusions of black magic—just the opposite of the narrow claim that had brought him victory against the bookseller.
Still, Crowley must have known, in advance of the Hamnett trial, that he was facing stiff odds. In a pretrial memorandum, one of Crowley’s solicitors warned that if the defendants obtained a copy of White Stains, “your chances of winning this action are negligible.” (In fact, the defense did find a copy, which was produced in the courtroom but not read from.) A further difficulty Crowley faced was the lack of a noteworthy character witness. Appeals to Major General J. F. C. Fuller (who must have recalled, with grim satisfaction, Crowley’s failure to testify on behalf of George Cecil Jones in the Looking Glass action of 1910) and to J. W. N. Sullivan were rebuffed. In the end, the only willing voice was Karl Germer, whose testimony on behalf of his Prophet displayed noble integrity. The impact on the jury of the accented words of an unknown German acolyte? Surely nil.
Crowley would later aver that he had hoped to settle out of court. Nonetheless, the four-day trial commenced on April 9, 1934, with J. P. Eddy (later a magistrate) as lead counsel for Crowley, while Malcolm Hilbery (later Mr. Justice Hilbery) represented Constable and Martin O’Connor, a luminary of the London bar, appeared on behalf of Hamnett. Eddy made an effective opening statement in which he emphasized the Beast’s earnest lifelong search for spiritual truth and his avowed enmity, as a white magician, against the forces of “Black Magic” alluded to in Hamnett’s book. Crowley’s unconventional life could be attributed to the repressions he had endured as a young boy raised within the Plymouth Brethren creed. As for his Abbey in Cefalù, it was the site of white magical practices. No baby had disappeared.
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