Occulture

by Carl Abrahamsson

  Crowley’s paintings, drawings, and the Abbey of Thelema murals at Cefalu were also creative externalizations, although considerably rougher in execution, and there seems to have been no other plan in painting them than simply to paint. Crowley’s visual works exist today in private collections, and once in a while, these are exhibited (London 1998, Paris 2008, Australia 2012). A substantial monograph of Crowley as an artist has yet to be published.

  Both Steiner and Crowley were extroverts, but for different reasons. Steiner was a distinct Apollonian character by Nietzsche’s definition, and Crowley very much a Dionysian one. Crowley wrote well but was inept at handling people not immediately of use to him. Steiner was not the best writer but could deliver inspiring lectures. Crowley was lucky to have a few intelligent people around when he was about to die. And, not forgetting, Crowley’s publishing efforts have indeed been talismanically successful. Steiner was more of a structured Germanic mind and basically worked himself to death to secure the immortality of Anthroposophy. His bouquet is considerably larger than Crowley’s, and we are all more or less exposed to it when we eat organically produced foods, for instance, or send our kids to Waldorf schools, or use Weleda products. The pioneering research in Steiner’s Spiritual Science has definitely made an impact on contemporary culture far more than Crowley’s Scientific Illuminism. At least so far.

  If one wanted to be a little bit mean-spirited, one could present two parallel images under the umbrella of spiritual centers of the 1920s. One would be a run-down farmhouse in a Sicilian fishing village, its walls painted with obscene poetry and impressionistic demons; the other would be an architecturally advanced and radical building in the Swiss countryside, designed to transmit the spirit of Goethe into the cosmos.

  However, it’s totally unfair to measure these concepts or systems in terms of quantity and visibility. Crowley’s system, after all, is either highly personal and secretive (AA) or intrafraternal (OTO). The Thelemic environment is more of a private sphere, in which a spiritual, magical attainment is encouraged. Whether that is of any use or interest to anyone else is not relevant unless stated so by the adept in question.

  While on the subject of the OTO, I think I should mention too that Steiner met the head of the order at the time, Theodor Reuss, in 1906 in Switzerland—a meeting arranged by leading Theosophist Annie Besant. This was the pre-Thelema OTO of course. These gentlemen found enough common ground to stand on that Steiner became head of an OTO lodge called Mysteria Mystica. Steiner was curious, as he had been about Theosophy, and also sought new environments in which to develop himself as a spiritual teacher. His engagement with OTO phased out quite quickly though. Reuss, Hartmann, and the other early OTO protagonists had a somewhat strange reputation because it was more or less known, even back then, that OTO worked with esoteric tantric sexual rituals in the higher degrees. Perhaps this became too much for Steiner, who was more or less celibate. Anyway, six years later Reuss knocked on Crowley’s door, and the rest, as they say, is history. And another reason why we are gathered here today.

  At Christmas 1923, Steiner announced to his followers that a new and more ambitious organization, the General Anthroposophical Society, had been set up and that from now on, the publishing of all his lectures was officially sanctioned. Both these developments allowed for a much smoother, and much more public life for the philosophy itself and its many creative offshoots. He also announced a College for Spiritual Science that would teach advanced Anthroposophy at the Goetheanum in Dornach and other places. The name alone makes me think of AA as a “College of Scientific Illuminism.” There was apparently something in the air that allowed for these teaching structures to manifest on similar lines, regardless of whether they were public or highly secretive.

  As the old Anthroposophical Society gave way for this new and better-organized one, Steiner personally issued and signed membership cards for all the old members—twelve thousand of them! And the first big thing to deal with was the rebuilding of the Goetheanum, a large-scale process that actually continued in terms of final decorations well up until the 1990s.

  The word general is perhaps a magical clue to the success of Anthropsophy after Steiner’s death and, of course, especially after the Second World War. Steiner’s almost Taoist approach to merge with and augment, improve, develop, and never clash with or use force, allowed for an easy integration into a general mind frame of general society. Sure, some of the ideas of Atlantean civilizations, reincarnation, cosmic farming, eurythmic healing, and so forth, may still be hard to grasp for most people, but no one can deny the common sense of eating biodynamically or at least organically grown food, or the well-documented success of the Waldorf education system, or the Camphill environments for individuals with learning disorders, and so on.

  Crowley’s attitude was almost diametrical to this: “The key to joy is disobedience.” We can never find out if this was willed or if he was making a virtue out of necessity. But I suspect that his drug addiction was the biggest real demon in his life. Not only because of the related financial and physical strains, but because of the will aspect. Although I’m sure he did want to get rid of the addiction, he simply couldn’t. We can rationalize and say that just makes him all the more human, sure, but for the Great Beast himself, I believe the persona as the agent provocateur of a new era defined by will was rather unwillingly upheld, and that he would much rather have been someone considerably more welcome in the upper echelons of British society. Crowley’s head-on hedonism facilitated a media image that in many ways still lingers on, and it is far from useful to Thelema as a general philosophy that has the potential to transform individual lives, with or without the technology of magic.

  It is highly interesting to compare these systems that are so alike in many ways but also so very marked by their creators and their specific psychological traits. And they were both aware of it, for good and bad, and of what lay behind. In both systems, the concepts of karma and reincarnation are present, and both men encouraged their adepts to research previous lives on the inner planes, as they had done themselves. If this research wasn’t done properly, one would perhaps have to make similar mistakes over again.

  Steiner was unusually clear when he wrote of these principles: “Through memory, the soul preserves yesterday; through action, it prepares tomorrow.” And: “As a spiritual being, I must be the repetition of one whose biography can explain mine.” And: “I must connect to what I did yesterday if my life is to have order and continuity. Yesterday’s actions have become the conditions that regulate what I do today. Through my actions yesterday, I created my destiny for today.”3

  There is in this integration of karma also an accentuation of the holistic. Despite the fact that we are individuals, and we can only really develop on the individual level by gradual refinement, what we do also affects others, and vice versa. These were thoughts that had been around for a long time, even in Europe. John Donne, the seventeenth-century British poet described it well several hundred years before Theosophy: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . . . Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”4

  Perhaps Donne is a good example in this case, as he too was in between faiths, so to speak. Having been born a Catholic in England, Donne and his family had been exposed to intolerant harassment and even religious murder. When he eventually became a Protestant within the Church of England, he was suddenly lauded and could speak and write freely about almost anything he wished, including the need for tolerance and open-mindedness. It is in a way as if restraint brings an inherent desire for freedom. How this expresses itself has to do mainly with the ego of the person expressing it. Donne was an intelligent opportunist who worked the system to his own benefit. That has benefited us too, as his works and ideas were allowed to remain and survive.

  Crowley formulated instructions for the AA concerning
knowledge of previous incarnations, as that was thought to be essential for magical development. In “Liber 913, Thisharb,” he constructed a method for the mind to work backward in order to strengthen the individual memory to the level of transcending the present incarnation: “Memory is essential to the individual consciousness; otherwise the mind were but a blank sheet on which shadows are cast. But we see that not only does the mind retain impressions, but that it is so constituted that its tendency is to retain some more excellently than others.”5

  What remains if we look at other people’s memories of these gentlemen? In Crowley’s case it depends exclusively on the vantage point of the firsthand writer in question. If Crowley was good to the writer, then the recollection is good. If Crowley was bad or perceived as bad to the writer, then the recollection is bad. A prime example of subjective history writing, and something that was amplified by the fact that he was so infamous as a public figure in the United Kingdom.

  It is as if the impressions of the man Crowley are so predominant that more or less objective analyses of his work from his own time are nonexistent. His own descriptions are literally hagiographic (as in his own Confessions), and those of, say Fuller or Achad, could easily be seen as hagiographic by proxy. It is mainly during the most recent decades that real Crowley biographies have been written, and these have indeed been very ambitious and well-researched projects.*3

  In Steiner’s case, it is almost as if the person Rudolf Steiner didn’t exist. There is, of course, a great deal of hagiographic subjectivity in his case too, but that certainly doesn’t stem from himself. He did write an autobiography at the request of his followers, but it is very low-key and basically a chronological recounting of meetings and projects. And, lest we forget, he didn’t have the time to finish his own proper biography. It only goes as far as 1907, and that was in many ways when things started to become really interesting in his life. So we are left with other people’s accounts of his life, and mostly of the yea-saying variety.

  As we can see, there are many similarities between the teachings. Crowley was predominantly interested in the technology of magic and in refining and handling the philosophy of The Book of the Law. Steiner was a magnificent visionary who also worked hard at trying the resulting ideas out and making them useful for others. These gentlemen had similar goals but were very different in individual behavior and attitudes. Perhaps we can allow ourselves to regard them as two aspects of the very same phenomenon or entity, like a Horus and Set, a Lucifer and Ahriman, a Christ and a Great Beast, where each facilitates a united dynamic energy in which a human individual can have an uncensored look at him- or herself. This is undoubtedly a fascinating area of study and speculation that requires a lot more research and one that will be, I suspect, revealing and rewarding for both these cosmic philosophies of life.

  7

  Paul Bowles

  Expat Magic

  Originally a lecture delivered at the Here to Go symposium in Trondheim, Norway, 2014.

  ONE WONDERS WHAT makes certain people appear at the correct time-space intersections to make a maximum impact. It doesn’t need to be loudmouthed enfants terribles forcing their way, nor fey, evanescent, and misunderstood geniuses generating emotional vacuums for others to fill. Some artists simply leave a trail of very tangible history behind them. And they attract both interesting people and events as they go.

  It seems that conscious strategy is actually quite counterproductive in this sense. If you push too hard in the moment, you will be stuck there. You just need to be, and preferably be yourself, in the flow of things, in between events and key people. That in itself creates a resonant life rhythm, in which the beats are expressions and the syncopations the creative processes.

  One such very rhythmically conscious figure in twentieth-century Western culture was the American author Paul Bowles (1910–99). His stern and elegant prose usually focuses on how people from one environment react in another. Bowles should have known, and did know about this, being a seasoned traveler and so-called expat for the greater part of his life. For him, being away from the United States was not merely escapism in order to find a nice secluded place to work. The place in itself—in his case predominantly Tangier in Morocco—soon became integrated not only in his writing but also in his general state of mind.

  Initially Bowles’s first love was music. He wanted to become a serious composer and worked hard to achieve that. He studied with Aaron Copland and traveled to Europe with him in the early 1930s, wrote music, and also had it performed successfully. He was at one point accepted by Prokofjev as a student but was too restless to pursue the invitation. Bowles wanted to be on his way, without really knowing what that way or journey would bring.

  Bowles was in Paris in the midst of surrealism’s glory days and was mentored by legendary art patron and collector Gertude Stein. It was actually Stein who suggested Bowles should go to Morocco in the first place, which he did, in 1931. Shortly before this he spent time in Berlin, where he also left his mark in his friendship with Christopher Isherwood. Remember Sally Bowles in Farewell to Berlin or its classic movie musical adaption, Cabaret? She was named after Paul Bowles.

  He wrote music criticism for the New York Herald Tribune during the 1940s. The editor Virgil Thomson’s strict orders were to describe what happened during the concert, not to relay one’s own feelings: be sparse, economic, detached, but always eloquent. This clear and concise mode of expression spilled over into Bowles’s novels and short stories.

  He married another author, Jane Auer, and the couple became some kind of center of attention wherever they went. She was celebrated for her novel Two Serious Ladies (1943), and Bowles’s reputation as a cultured composer and writer of reviews opened many doors in a postwar American environment ready for experimentation of all kinds.

  The Bowleses traveled in Asia (where they even bought a small island outside Sri Lanka and then spent several months per year there), Central and South America, and Europe, but once they had established themselves somewhat in Tangier, it seemed impossible to leave. It was a cheap place to live, and its strategic position as an international free-trade zone brought interesting people, drugs, and sexualities. Under the surface it was indeed a liberal place. That is, if you were a Westerner with money to spend. Noël Coward once called the city “a sunny place for shady people.”

  Of course, the Bowleses were not alone here. Fellow expats with somewhat similar backgrounds were Brion Gysin, a close friend of Bowles’s (they had met already in 1938 in Paris), and William Burroughs. Although these two beat mentors have contributed immensely to the glamour of Morocco, it was always Paul and Jane Bowles who were the real royalty. They weren’t beat at all, but rather aloof yet welcoming to this newer generation of Ginsbergs, Kerouacs, and others. William Burroughs’s paranoid “Interzone” environment was a drug-filtered version of 1950s and’60s expat Tangier. Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon, and many other gay culturati flocked to the liberal city they had all heard so much about. And Paul Bowles was undoubtedly king of the hill.

  Bowles’s presence was actually the reason for Burroughs’s coming to Tangier in the first place.1 Burroughs often called Bowles’s first novel, The Sheltering Sky, a “perfect” novel. When Burroughs originally arrived, though, Bowles was out of town, which made Burroughs critical and moody: “And don’t ever fall for this inscrutable oriental shit like Bowles puts down (that shameless faker). They are just a gabby, gossipy simple-minded, lazy crew of citizens.”2 It took time before these two expats really met, and even then, it was slightly troublesome. Burroughs had borrowed a bound original script of Tennessee Williams’s The Angel in the Alcove from Bowles. When he returned it, it was splattered with blood from Burroughs’s shooting up heroin beside the manuscript.3 Eventually, though, a friendship grew.

  As the decades passed, Bowles became an icon of sorts, someone you sought out in Morocco if you were a budding writer or artist. Knowing Bowles opened doors, a
lthough he himself just existed in the here and now and never really networked actively in the way we think about it today. There seems to have existed some kind of aura around him and his work that attracted similar minds or at least wannabe similar minds looking for adventure, allowing the imagination to bloom, seeing other parts of the world, getting high and getting away.

  Bowles continued writing until his death in 1999, always in the same style and usually on the same themes. After Black Sparrow Press anthologized his short stories in 1979 (a volume that was introduced by Gore Vidal), a new interest in his work emerged. Bernardo Bertolucci made a successful movie of The Sheltering Sky in 1990 with John Malkovich and Debra Winger, which brought new generations to Bowles’s work.

  As mentioned, Bowles died in 1999 and seemed not too distraught about moving on. On the whole, all through his life he seems to have been permeated by a real sense of detachment, a désinvolture not unlike that of German author Ernst Jünger. He was diligent in his writing and made very sure life swirled around the work, not the other way around.

  There’s no escaping that Bowles’s work has one underlying theme: getting away—either getting away from somewhere or to somewhere, but also getting away with things that are immoral or downright criminal. There is no sense of traditional justice in his stories, and there isn’t really any kind of deep-seated moral code involved. There’s a pragmatism about life, a sense of seeing what is possible. I believe this was very much influenced by Moroccan culture in Bowles’s case.

  Expat is short for ex patria: “outside the fatherland or nation.” This was of course true for Bowles. But it can also mean outside the sphere of the father, and this was equally important, consciously or not. Bowles hated his father and, as he often expressed, couldn’t wait to get away. The young Bowles wasn’t allowed to see other children, and his compensatory and creative mind started reading and writing and making up fantasy worlds, complete with maps and directions. Quite often, his father literally destroyed these fantasy worlds of the confused boy.