This passage illustrates the manner in which Crowley subtly integrated the secrets of sexual magic into his discourse. As Richard Cavendish has noted, Crowley connected “Ayin,” the Hebrew letter attributed to the Devil trump, with “the ‘secret eye’ of the phallus.” That secret eye—the “eye in the center of its forehead”—is conjoined with the “most secret mountains”—the vagina or mons veneris. The wand is a further veil for the phallus as creative life fount. The sap within the Tree of Life is the Amrita and Elixir.
The public reception of Thoth was all but nonexistent. In the final year of a brutal war, the niceties of Tarot were of interest to few, and the price of ten guineas was prohibitive to all but the most avid of these. Still, the limited edition of Thoth did find appreciative subscribers—and managed to put some money in Crowley’s pockets. Louis Wilkinson recalled Crowley’s boast of having made £1500 from Thoth in three months:
“Now you see,” he then said, “how idiotic it is to have a publisher.” I pointed out that the very considerable cost of producing the book should be put to the debit account. Crowley looked surprised. “Oh, of course,” he said, “if the author is fool enough to pay for the printing and binding—” I might have reminded him that that was what in the old days he had always been foolish enough to do.
Wilkinson also recounted Crowley’s integrity in handling the publication funds supplied to him by the O.T.O. Frieda Harris told Wilkinson that Crowley had refrained, though his health was now in sharp decline, from touching some £500 pounds stored in a strongbox under his bed. Harris persuaded Crowley to use some of the money to hire a trained nurse, on the grounds that the health of the leader of the O.T.O. was a suitable purpose upon which to expend its funds.
Just how long Crowley enjoyed the services of a nurse is unclear. What is plain is that, beginning in the winter of 1943, his health slumped to the point that his heroin dependence deepened. Crowley averaged four to six grains of heroin per day in 1943 and 1944, and roughly ten grains per day for the first half of 1945. These levels might have killed a man less accustomed than Crowley to the drug. The Beast obtained prescriptions from sometimes-reluctant doctors and pharmacists—the drugs he used included not only heroin, but also veronal, ethyl oxide, and cocaine. This strained the tolerance of the British law-enforcement authorities, who on at least one occasion paid a call on Crowley to investigate his prescriptions. Legalities aside, Crowley was well aware that his drug use was both desperate and debilitating. In one 1943 diary entry, he noted the frustration of trying to hold to lower heroin dosages without being able to wean himself from the drug: “Much of this is just fighting through. This passive courage is all very well, but it’s so aimless.”
Crowley undertook one last major writing effort in the latter months of 1944 and on into 1945. This was a series of informal letters—in response to the queries of a female aspirant to the Great Work—on a potpourri of magical subjects. The name of the aspirant, not given in the published work, was Anne Macky (Soror Fiat Yod, “Let there be a Foundation”), an Englishwoman whom Crowley met in 1943. Macky had a strong interest, but little background, in magic. For Crowley, she exemplified the ordinary reader who might wish to approach the subject—but without intimidation. Most of his letters were actually sent to Macky, who seems not to have progressed far in her studies. Nonetheless, Crowley fashioned the idea for a book originally titled Aleister Explains Everything, but later changed by Crowley to Magick Without Tears; the letters were published posthumously, by the loyal Germer, in 1954. It is a disappointing work. Crowley was straining both to be gallant to the lady and pithily amusing; the results were garrulity, repetition, and overlong quotations from his own prior works.
In April 1944, as this last book project was under way, Crowley moved from 93 Jermyn Street to an outlying country residence, the venerable Bell Inn at Aston Clinton, Bucks. This transfer of residence stemmed from two primary factors—Crowley’s unsatisfied back rent, and the frequency of the London bombing raids that had worn on the Beast’s nerves. Daphne Harris, Crowley’s landlady at the Bell Inn, where he lived until January 1945, recalled that the old man was decidedly unusual, albeit polite, and possessed a sense of humor that was as much self-mocking as wicked. An R.A.F. squadron was using the Bell Inn as a mess hall during the war, and several of the pilots took note of the now-gaunt Crowley, with his flamboyant red cloaks, plus-fours, knee buckles, filmy white hair, and elfin beard. “They would laugh at him and say he looked like the Devil,” said Harris in an interview. “So one day he came to the bottom of the stairs having arranged his remaining side wisps of hair in a devilish fashion. He said to them, ‘Dear boys, now you can see the horns.’” Crowley evoked a deeper fear in a nurse who was tending him during this period, and whom he asked one day to take a large hatchet to be sharpened, for reasons that remain unknown to Harris. The nurse was terrified by this request, fearing that Crowley would use the hatchet to sacrifice her son.
For her part, Harris regarded the fear and mystery surrounding Crowley as bunk. “I treated him as a joke. All the things people used to say about him—stupid nonsense. He wouldn’t allow us to go in his room. Finally, one day when he went into London, we let ourselves in and opened all the windows to air it out, which it needed—the stink was awful.” Crowley was receiving regular packets from his London pharmacist, and also had (by what means is unknown) a steady supply of partridge eggs, with which he repeatedly attempted to bribe Harris into providing him with other foodstuffs subject to wartime rationing. When the bribes failed, Crowley did not hesitate to filch from the kitchen. Said Harris, “He stole sugar, which he said he needed. He was wicked enough to steal and obviously a phony. If he was such a great God, as he believed, he wouldn’t have had to steal. Given the wartime situation, he was just a bore and a nuisance in a time of great stress, a worry to us all.”
It was, perhaps, declining relations with Harris that led Crowley to seek out more hospitable lodgings. In late January 1945, Crowley relocated for the last time in his life—the wandering was at an end. His choice was the sedate guest house at Netherwoods, The Ridge, Hastings. The proprietors were Vernon Symonds, a playwright and actor of modest accomplishments, and his wife, Johnny. They were a buoyant middle-aged couple determined to create a unique atmosphere for their establishment. The brochure composed by Vernon Symonds declared that “this house will never be a guest house in the ordinary sense of the term. Those seeking a conventional establishment in this district will be able to find better accommodations elsewhere, for my friends care more for fine food than for the ritual of dressing for dinner, and more for culture and the arts than for bridge and poker.”
The capacity of his new landlords to weather Crowley’s eccentricities was tested on the very day of his arrival. Johnny Symonds recalled that no definite date of occupancy had been fixed. “Then out of the blue we got a telegram which read: EXPECT CONSIGNMENT OF FROZEN MEAT ON (date given). Well, we were somewhat perplexed by this because we hadn’t ordered any meat and we were even more surprised when the day arrived and two food inspectors turned up in anticipation of the delivery. While we were talking to them an ambulance suddenly came down the drive and deposited, on our doorstep, Aleister Crowley and 40 brown paper parcels. The frozen meat had arrived.”
Crowley’s routine at Netherwood was a regular and largely private one. His housekeeper—whom he teased, to her lack of amusement, by claiming that she was a witch who had flown past his window on a broomstick—would bring him breakfast at nine. A brief garden stroll followed at ten. Crowley spent most of the day in his sitting room, No. 13, at the front of the house, which featured a wardrobe, writing table, bookshelf, single bed, and bathroom. He often entertained visiting guests, such as Louis Wilkinson, Robert Cecil, Frieda Harris, and Michael Houghton, the then owner of the Atlantis Bookshop in London, in which Crowley’s limited editions fetched steep prices.
Crowley also became acquainted with his neighbors on The Ridge, many of whom found him a charming old gentl
eman with courtly manners and a winning appeal with their children. One of these children had a party at Netherwood and specially requested that Crowley attend. According to Mrs. Pitcairn-Knowles, the child’s aunt, the Beast rose wonderfully to the occasion, arriving “dressed in a magnificent turquoise robe with a cummerbund, into which was pushed a large dagger, and with a turban on his head. And on his fingers he had enormous rings made from lumps of uncut turquoise. He just sat and beamed at the children, ate some food and then, later, went to bed. The children all seemed very much at home with him.”
Crowley had been led initially to Netherwoods through the help of Louis Wilkinson, who had enlisted the aid of his son Oliver to find new lodgings for the Beast. Oliver Wilkinson had, as a young boy, encountered Crowley in New York during the final years of World War One. His mother, Frances Gregg, was still married to Louis Wilkinson at that time, and she strongly disapproved of her husband’s friendship with Crowley. This angered Crowley, who mounted a strategy of playing upon Gregg’s nerves by means including subtle threats of harming her children. Gregg’s nerves were shaken to the point that she was in danger of being psychiatrically committed—through the dual complicity of Crowley and her husband. This was averted, and the couple moved away from New York (and Crowley) for a time; but Gregg’s health was damaged and the marriage ended but a few years later. Small wonder that Oliver Wilkinson later declared: “I was eight when I determined to hunt Crowley down and kill him for the fear he caused my mother, and the evil he brought into the world.”
In later years, Oliver Wilkinson took a more moderate view of the aged Beast, whom he helped install at Netherwood. “Aleister Crowley has earned himself a place a place among the remembered names of the world. He deserves more than the interest we might give to a two-headed sheep at the fair.” The fundamental disagreement between Oliver Wilkinson and his father on the merits of Crowley’s life outlook were aptly summarized by the son:
Crowley’s belief in the words with which he ended his letters, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,’ seems inexact for so intelligent a man; for there was always equal emphasis on ‘The slave shall serve.’ ‘Is that the slave’s will?’ I asked my father. ‘Yes,’ he answered without hesitation, ‘The slave wishes to serve—knows that is what he is fitted for.’ Which is, of course, convenient for the slave-owner. Compare Christ washing the feet of the disciples.
This anecdote confirms the strong degree to which Crowley and Louis Wilkinson shared a philosophical, if not a religious, outlook; thus it was that, in 1946, Wilkinson agreed, at Crowley’s request, to edit the Beast’s prior commentaries on the Book and so produce an “Authorized Popular Commentary.” Wilkinson completed this work in 1946; the text remained unpublished until 1996, well after the death of both men.
Wilkinson was a good friend rather than a loyal Thelemite (though Crowley did make him an honorary IX° O.T.O. in 1946). But there now arose a young candidate of exceptional promise whom Crowley undertook to train in Thelemic magick during the first months of 1945. This was Kenneth Grant, a precocious student of the occult who had first encountered Crowley’s works at age fourteen. Grant was twenty when, having initiated a correspondence, he met with Crowley in December 1944. After the Beast’s move to Netherwood, he suggested that Grant move there as well, a cottage on the grounds being available. In advance letters, Crowley held forth alluring promises of contacts with London literati and, ultimately, a good salary from the O.T.O. The more modest but, to Grant, quite satisfactory reality was, as he later recalled, that “in return for magical instruction, I would act as his secretary, nurse, factotum, everything. In other words, do service to the guru, gurusev.”
Grant has, in the past decades, become one of the most prominent interpreters of Crowley’s magick. In his memoir, Remembering Aleister Crowley (1991), Grant left an invaluable portrait of life as a student of the Beast. By now, Crowley was a mere wisp of the forbidding figure he had once cut before disciples such as Neuburg, Mudd, Yorke, and Regardie. Grant observed: “The paunchy, seedy, bohemian appearance of a decade ago had given way to a refinement that suggested the fragile ivory figure of a mandarin, of which the hands were, perhaps, the most singular feature; slightly yellow, beautifully articulated and curiously small. Approaching the house, he threw up his arms and muttered the lines from Liber Resh [Liber Resh vel Helios, containing Crowley’s four daily prayers to the Sun]: ‘Hail unto thee who art Ahathor in thy beauty’—the midday adoration.”
The two studied together, page by page, Crowley’s Magick. The Beast assigned written examinations for Grant on subjects including Buddhism, the creation of magical rituals, and the astrological interpretation of nativities. There was also practical training in astral visions. Crowley employed, as a talisman for his own astral work, a gold disk or coin which he would slip into his mouth. He tested Grant’s ability in the astral realm by a procedure that included the use of unknown symbols (to determine if the student would explore the spiritual realm indicated without conscious foreknowledge) and the taking of ether. Grant described this latter procedure in another of his works, The Magical Revival (1972):
He would draw a glyph or symbol that was quite unknown to me, and I proceeded as follows: With eyes closed I imagined the dark surface of a door, closed and set in a blank wall. When this mental image did not waver, but not before, I superimposed the symbol upon it so that it glowed vividly in white light. Still holding the image steady, I inhaled the ether. As I inhaled, the symbol appeared to grow immensely bright, increasing or diminishing in size despite my attempts to keep it steady. This defect in concentration took me some time to overcome. When the image remained invariable, I proceeded to the next stage of the experiment which was to visualize the gradual opening of the door in the wall. The vista beyond was wrapped in a hazy mist. I transferred the symbol to the mist and then projected my consciousness through the door by willing myself through it. I found myself, suddenly, bereft of my body [ … ] It seemed as real, if not more so, as a mundane landscape. It conformed in one way or another with a region of the astral plane consonant with the nature of the symbol visualized.
Crowley was initially reluctant, in their discussions, to so much as hint at the sexual magic doctrines that were at the heart of his work. “Crowley told me,” Grant wrote, “that the procedure was, that if I could tell him the secret of the Ninth Degree O.T.O., it would be his duty to confirm it, but only then.” Gradually, during his studies at Netherwood, Grant achieved an understanding of that secret which he conveyed, at Crowley’s request, in essay form. The essay satisfied Crowley and the IX° was bestowed without formality. Grant offered a valuable hint, in The Magical Revival, as to the nature of sexual magic; contrary to the usual understanding, Grant argued, the texts and rituals of sexual magic were “exoteric”; the actual physiological phenomena, which had to be experienced to be understood, constituted the true “esoteric” secret.
Grant’s duties as Crowley’s student included procurement of drugs and whiskey and management of the Beast’s mundane affairs. The young man was, by his own admission, ill-suited for such tasks. As Grant later admitted, “I was beginning to realize that Crowley’s demands were unending. As Austin Spare frequently observed: ‘Enough is too much!’” Grant’s stay ended in June 1945 when, at the urging of his father, who yearned for more practical prospects for his son, Grant returned to London—with, however, his interest in Crowley’s magick very much intact. For his part, Crowley regarded Grant as a potential future leader of the British O.T.O.
During his first months at Netherwood, Crowley received visits from Dion Fortune, the prominent occultist whose essay on Crowley’s Magick was discussed in Chapter Nine. Fortune and Crowley first met in person in March 1939; the site was a London lecture hall named The Belfry and, according to some sources, the two eminences merely bowed without exchanging words. In his caustic diary entry noting the occasion, however, Crowley confirmed that they did speak: “Dion Fortune—Public Bat No. 1 at The Belfry.
Like a hippo with false teeth. Talk—bubbling of tinned tomato soup.”
It was hardly to be expected that Crowley would be gracious to a rival, particularly one who had achieved a respectability that eluded him. For her part, Fortune seems, prior to the time of their meeting, to have adopted the viewpoint of Crowley the person (as opposed to the author, to whose works she paid homage) promulgated by the tabloid press. In her 1935 novel The Winged Bull, the character of the villanous black magician, “Hugo Astley,” is modeled on this “public” Crowley.
But the mutual respect which underlay their suspicions resulted not only in Fortune paying visits to Netherwood, but also in a correspondence that endured until Fortune’s death from leukemia in January 1946. Nearly all of that correspondence has been lost. Those few letters which survive—one by Crowley, one and a portion of a second by Fortune—indicate a comfortable tone between two persons who shared an absolute dedication to magic. In his missive, Crowley adopted a ready air of superiority. In hers, Fortune played the submissive role; she chided the Beast, in January 1942, for overestimating her intelligence and averred that “My mentality always has hampered my work, and, I am afraid, always will.” Jeanne Chapman, in her biography of Fortune, argued plausibly that “Crowley was sixteen years her senior, which tended to create a sort of father-daughter or male-teacher-female-pupil relationship. The self-derogatory statement can be ascribed to this relationship dynamic, but also, I hate to admit, to the nauseating way many intelligent women used to deprecate themselves and minimize their accomplishments and abilities when in the presence of the ‘all-powerful male.’” But this explanation seems patronizing to Fortune, an accomplished author and occult leader. It is just possible that Fortune was expressing what she believed to be the truth—that her intellect was not the greatest of her gifts, and that Crowley was her superior as a theorist and scholar. Certainly, Fortune was every bit Crowley’s equal as a novelist, and arguably his superior as an expositor—in numerous lucid volumes—of basic magical practice. There is no reason to believe that she was in doubt as to these latter points.
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