by Colin Wilson
In December 1899, convinced that it was time he moved up to a higher grade in the Golden Dawn, Crowley went to London to demand initiation. This was refused through the efforts of Yeats and various other senior members, who regarded him as an overgrown juvenile delinquent. Crowley therefore went to Paris and persuaded Mathers to perform the necessary rituals. He also took the opportunity to stir up trouble, convincing Mathers that he had a revolt on his hands. Mathers sent him back to London with instructions to break into the Golden Dawn headquarters, and to put new locks on all the doors. Yeats, Florence Farr, and the other London initiates were enraged.
The legal wrangle that ensued in 1901 broke up the original Golden Dawn thirteen years after it had been founded. One group of members, under the leadership of A. E. Waite, managed to continue for another four years, still calling themselves the Golden Dawn. Another group, including Yeats, Florence Farr, and the novelist Arthur Machen, was led until 1905 by Dr R. W. Felkin, who then founded a magical society called the Stella Matutina, or Morning Star. Finally, in the 1920s, a talented young medium and occultist who called herself Dion Fortune founded the Society of the Inner Light, based on Golden Dawn rituals obtained from Mrs Mathers—Mathers himself having died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
The same year of the legal problems the Golden Dawn had received another blow in the form of a sudden spate of unwelcome publicity. It happened when a couple of confidence tricksters who called themselves Mr and Mrs Horos were accused of raping a 16-year-old girl. Mrs Horos had learned that it was supposed to have been Fräulein Sprengel who had given the Golden Dawn its charter. She went to Paris and introduced herself to Mathers as Fräulein Sprengel. Oddly enough, Mathers was taken in—which could argue that he was not at that time aware that Fräulein Sprengel had been invented by Westcott. Mathers soon became suspicious of the couple, whereupon Mrs Horos and her husband stole some of the rituals of the Golden Dawn and fled to London. There they launched into a career of confidence trickery based on a mixture of spurious occultism, extortion, and sex. When charged with their crimes they claimed to be leaders of the Golden Dawn. As a consequence, many of the most intimate secrets of the order were made public and sensationalised by the press. The publicity, combined with the power struggles within it, sealed the fate of the Golden Dawn.
Crowley had decided to get away before the Horos scandal broke. Late in 1900 he had gone to Mexico, where he studied the Cabala, practiced yoga, and—according to his own account—finally became a true magician. When he returned to Paris in 1902 he tried to persuade Mathers to take up yoga. Mathers declined, and their relation became several degrees colder. Eventually it turned into hatred, with Mathers and Crowley pronouncing magical curses on one another. Crowley claimed that his curses were actually responsible for the death of Mathers.
Back in England, Crowley married Rose Kelly, and they travelled to Ceylon and Egypt. They called themselves the Prince and Princess Chioa Khan. In Cairo, Crowley performed various rituals with the intention of invoking the Egyptian god Horus. On April 8, 1904, he received instructions from his wife, who had taken to uttering strange messages while in a trance-like state, to go into a room he had furnished as a temple. Suddenly he heard a disembodied voice ordering him to write. What Crowley wrote was an odd document called The Book of the Law, which became the cornerstone of his later teaching. He claimed that it was dictated by Aiwass, one of the Secret Chiefs. Its basic teaching was expressed in the phrase: ‘Do what you will.’
In 1905 Crowley went to the Himalayas to attempt the climb of Kanchenjunga, third highest mountain in the world. During the climb he quarrelled with the rest of the team and, when they were buried in an avalanche, made no attempt to help them. Several were killed. He deserted his wife and baby in India where the baby died of typhoid. Rose later became an alcoholic, and died insane. In a magazine called The Equinox Crowley began to publish the secret rituals of the Golden Dawn. Mathers took him to court for this, but lost his case.
In 1912 Crowley received a communication from another magical organization, the Order of the Temple of the Orient, reproaching him for publishing its secrets. Puzzled by the accusation, Crowley went to see Theodor Reuss, one of the O.T.O.’s leaders. It appeared that the secret in question was something called sex magic. It arose from the system of yoga known as Tantra, which attempts to use the power of sexual energy to fuel the drive toward higher consciousness. The O.T.O. had, it seems, developed its own form of Tantric techniques. Crowley was fascinated, and promptly availed himself of Reuss’s permission to set up an English branch of the O.T.O. Magical ritual performed by Crowley often involved sex magic—with his disciple Victor Neuberg it was an act of sodomy. Sex magic remained one of Crowley’s central enthusiasms for the rest of his life—though addiction to heroin and cocaine lessened his sex drive in later years.
In the United States during World War I Crowley had an endless series of mistresses, each of whom he liked to call the ‘Scarlet Woman’. He undoubtedly had an exceptional sexual appetite, but it must also be said that he genuinely believed that sex magic heightened his self-awareness, and enabled him to tap increasing profound levels of consciousness. At all events during this period Crowley steadily developed a kind of hypnotic power that it is as difficult to account for as it is to describe. William Seabrook, an American writer on the occult, witnessed the use of this power one day when he and Crowley were walking on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Crowley began to follow a complete stranger who was walking along the sidewalk. Crowley followed a few yards behind, keeping in perfect step with him. Suddenly, Crowley allowed his knees to buckle, and dropped momentarily to the ground. At exactly the same moment, the man he was following collapsed in precisely the same manner.
By the early 1920s Crowley, who was suffering from asthma, was almost permanently in debt. A legacy of $12,000 enabled him to move to a small farmhouse in Cefalu, Italy. He called it the Abbey of Thelema, which means ‘Do what you will’, began to practise magic, and invited disciples to join him. He provided apparently limitless quantities of drugs for anyone who wished to use them, and attractive women devotees were expected to help Crowley practise his sex magic. Even with the legacy, however, the money problem remained pressing. Crowley wrote a novel called Diary of a Drug Fiend and started his Confessions, which he called his hagiography (the biography of a saint). He announced that the earth had now passed beyond Christianity and had entered the new epoch of Crowleyanity. But when one of his disciples died after sacrificing a cat and drinking its blood, the resulting newspaper scandal drove Crowley out of Sicily.
The British press denounced him as ‘the wickedest man in the world’ and, although he loved the publicity, he soon discovered that his notoriety made publishers shy away from his books. He deserted his disciples, one of whom committed suicide, and married again. His second wife, like the first, became insane. Hoping to make money, he sued the English sculptress Nina Hamnett for calling him a black magician. But when witnesses described Crowley’s magic, the judge stopped the case, declaring he had never heard such ‘dreadful, horrible, blasphemous, and abominable stuff.
By the outbreak of World War II Crowley had added alcoholism to his drug-addiction even though his daily intake of heroin at the time would have killed a dozen ordinary men. Every now and again he found rich disciples to support him until, inevitably, they lost patience with him. He retired to a rooming house near Hastings in southern England, and died there in December 1947 at the age of 72. John Symonds, a writer who had met him in his last years, later wrote his biography—a hilarious but often disturbing book. Other friends, notably Richard Cammell and Israel Regardie, wrote more sober and admiring accounts of his career. But it was not until the magical revival that began in the mid-1960s that Crowley’s reputation began to rise again. Nowadays more than a dozen of his books are in print, and a new generation ardently practises the magic rituals described in them. The Beast has finally achieved the fame he craved. Nonetheless, and fortunately, the great
age of Crowleyanity seems as far away as ever.
Occult powers seem to be a matter of national temperament. Second sight and telepathy come naturally to the Irish. The Germans seem to produce more gifted astrologers than other nations. The Dutch have produced two of the most gifted clairvoyants of this century: Croiset and Hurkos. Russia tends to produce mages—men or women who impress by their spiritual authority; no other nation has a spiritual equivalent of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky or even of Rozanov, Merezhkovsky, Soloviev, Fedorov, Berdyaev, Shestov. Certainly no other nation has come near to producing anyone like Madame Blavatsky, Grigory Rasputin or George Gurdjieff. Each is completely unique.
Grigory Rasputin’s body was taken from the frozen river Neva, in Petrograd, on January 1, 1917. He had been murdered three days before, and was one of the most notorious figures in Russia. Now that he was dead, he would become a legend all over the world—a symbol of evil, cunning, and lust. If ever you see a magazine story entitled ‘Rasputin, the Mad Monk’, you can be sure it will be full of lurid details of how Rasputin spent his days in drunken carousing, his nights in sexual debauchery; how he deceived the czar and czarina into thinking he was a miracle worker; how he was the evil genius who brought about the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the Romanov dynasty. It is all untrue. Yet it makes such a good story that there is little chance that Rasputin will ever receive justice. The truth about him is that he really was a miracle worker and a man of strange powers. He was certainly no saint—very few magicians are—and tales of his heavy drinking and sexual prowess are undoubtedly based on fact. But he was no diabolical schemer.
Rasputin was born in the village of Pokrovskoe in 1870. His father was a fairly well-to-do peasant. As a young man, Rasputin had a reputation for wildness until he visited a monastery and spent four months there in prayer and meditation. For the remainder of his life, he was obsessed by religion. He married at 19 and became a prosperous carter. Then the call came again; he left his family and took to the road as a kind of wandering monk. When eventually he returned, he was a changed man, exuding an extraordinarily powerful magnetism. The young people of his village were fascinated by him. He converted one room in his house into a church, and it was always full. The local priest became envious of his following, however, and Rasputin was forced to leave home again.
Rasputin had always possessed the gift of second sight. One day during his childhood this gift had revealed to him the identity of a peasant who had stolen a horse and hidden it in a barn. Now, on his second round of travels, he also began to develop extraordinary healing powers. He would kneel by the beds of the sick and pray; then he would lay hands on them, and cure many of them. When he came to what is now Leningrad, probably late in 1903, he already had a reputation as a wonder worker. Soon he was accepted in aristocratic society in spite of his rough peasant manners.
It was in 1907 that he suddenly became the power behind the throne. Three years before, Czarina Alexandra had given birth to a longed-for heir to the throne, Prince Alexei. But it was soon apparent that Alexei had inherited haemophilia, a disease that prevents the blood from clotting, and from which a victim may bleed to death even with a small cut. At the age of 3, the prince fell and bruised himself so severely that an internal hemorrhage developed. He lay in a fever for days, and doctors despaired of his life. Then the czarina recalled the man of God she had met two years earlier, and sent for Rasputin. As soon as he came in he said calmly: ‘Do not worry the child. He will be all right.’ He laid his hand on the boy’s forehead, sat down on the edge of the bed, and began to talk to him in a quiet voice. Then he knelt and prayed. In a few minutes the boy was in a deep and peaceful sleep, and the crisis was over.
Henceforward the czarina felt a powerful emotional dependence on Rasputin—a dependence nourished by the thinly veiled hostility with which Alexandra, a German, was treated at court. Rasputin’s homely strength brought her a feeling of security. The czar also began to confide in Rasputin, who became a man of influence at court. Nicholas II was a poor ruler, not so much cruel as weak, and too indecisive to stem the rising tide of social discontent. His opponents began to believe that Rasputin was responsible for some of the czar’s reactionary policies, and a host of powerful enemies began to gather. On several occasions the czar had to give way to the pressure and order Rasputin to leave the city. On one such occasion, the young prince fell and hurt himself again. For several days he tossed in agony, until he seemed too weak to survive. The czarina dispatched a telegram to Rasputin, and he telegraphed back: ‘The illness is not as dangerous as it seems.’ From the moment it was received, the prince began to recover.
World War I brought political revolution and military catastrophe to Russia. Its outbreak was marked by a strange coincidence: Rasputin was stabbed by a madwoman at precisely the same moment as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot at Sarajevo. Rasputin hated war, and might have been able to dissuade the czar from leading Russia into the conflict. But he was in bed recovering from his stab wound when the moment of decision came.
Rasputin’s end was planned by conspirators in the last days of 1916. He was lured to a cellar by Prince Felix Yussupov, a man he trusted. After feeding him poisoned cakes, Yussupov shot him in the back; then Rasputin was beaten with an iron bar. Such was his immense vitality that he was still alive when the murderers dropped him through the hole in the ice into the Neva. Among his papers was found a strange testament addressed to the czar. It stated that he had a strong feeling he would die by violence before January 1, 1917, and that if he were killed by peasants, the czar would reign for many years to come; but, if he were killed by aristocrats—as he was—then ‘none of your children or relations will remain alive for more than two years’. He was right. The czar and his family were all murdered in July 1918—an amazing example, among many, of Rasputin’s gift of precognition.
Rasputin—in fact as well as in legend—was one of the most remarkable men in Russia. Also remarkable was his compatriot and near contemporary Georgei Gurdjieff, who greatly influenced 20th-century occultism. Gurdjieff differs from most other men of strange powers in one important respect: he was not primarily a mage or wonder worker, but a philosopher obsessed by the problems of human futility. Why are human beings so weak? Why is human consciousness so narrow? Why do we spend our lives in a state of dullness resembling sleep? Above all, by what practical methods can we break through to the great ‘source of power, meaning, and purpose’ buried deep within ourselves? It was to questions like these that Gurdjieff addressed his life and work.
Gurdjieff was born in America in 1873. His parents were Greek, but he was Russian by nationality. From an early age he was intrigued by magic. One of the young men in his village could predict the future with astonishing accuracy after sitting between two lighted candles and going into a trance. At about this time Gurdjieff also witnessed a demonstration of the power of suggestion. He saw a boy who belonged to one of the many obscure local religious sects trapped in the middle of a magic circle drawn on the ground by some children of the village. He was psychologically incapable of stepping beyond the perimeter of the circle.
While still in his teens, Gurdjieff set out on what became twenty years of travel in Asia, Africa, and Europe in search of the secret wisdom that, he was convinced, was somewhere to be found. He learned the techniques of yoga and other forms of meditation in Tibetan monasteries and in Arab mosques; he studied hypnosis; he spent months with dervishes and with fakirs. In 1912, he returned to Russia, ready to teach some of the mysteries he had learned. Among the close circle of people who joined his group in Moscow was Peter Ouspensky, a young occultist and philosopher who was to become his most distinguished student.
On the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Gurdjieff left Moscow for his family home, then in the Caucasus. There he founded his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, and was soon joined by Ouspensky and others of his disciples. However, political conditions became too harsh in the Caucasus and, after attemptin
g to settle in Istanbul and in Germany, Gurdjieff re-established the Institute at the Prieuré near Paris in 1922.
Gurdjieff’s system of teaching was based on the idea that, under normal circumstances, man is asleep, and that he is enslaved by a robot that controls not only his automatic functions but also much of his intellectual and emotional life. Gurfjieff’s aim was to teach man how to outflank the robot by taking control of the vital reserves that exist in all of us, but that most people can tap only in times of crisis. We can all remember occasions in our lives when, faced with exceptionally difficult and perhaps dangerous situations, we have been-forced—if only briefly—to excel ourselves physically or mentally. At the moment of success we feel marvellously alive. We are aware of a feeling of freedom—and rightly so, for the greatest freedom consists in our capacity to control and direct our own most deep-seated powers. We say, with quite literal truth, ‘I didn’t know I had it in me!’
Gurdjieff’s method was to force his pupils constantly to extend their mental and physical limits. They lived almost monastic lives at the Prieuré, working from dawn to dusk and performing exercises designed to bring the mind, emotions, and body into harmony and under control. The aim was to achieve a state that Gurdjieff called ‘self-remembering’—a state in which a person is not only intensely aware of his surroundings but also aware of himself observing and participating in them: a marriage of total inner and outer awareness. If you want to test how difficult this is, try a simple exercise. Close your eyes and direct your attention inward until you are aware only of your inner self. Now open your eyes and and direct your attention toward the outside world. Now try to direct your attention to both at once—your inner self and the outside world. You will find that you can only do it for a few seconds at a time; then you ‘forget’, and become aware only of either your inner self or the outside world. In certain moments of great excitement or intensity, however, you realise that you can maintain a state of self-remembering for much longer.