Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World

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Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World Page 4

by Gary Lachman


  One tutor, however, seems to have penetrated Uncle Tom’s screening process. Archibald Douglas, a Bible salesman and a graduate of Oxford, was the closest thing to a normal person that Crowley had encountered. He introduced Crowley to smoking, drinking, gambling, billiards, and women. Douglas showed Crowley “a sane, clean, jolly world worth living in,” and it is tempting to speculate on how Crowley might have turned out if he were allowed to live in it longer.34 With Douglas, Crowley behaved like a “normal, healthy human being,” and the two enjoyed an excursion to the sea. In Torquay, a seaside town in Devon, Crowley met an actress and fell in love; for ten days “the detestable mysteries of sex were transformed into joy and beauty.” “The nightmare world of Christianity vanished” and “the obsession of sin fell from my shoulders into the sea of oblivion.”35 But this beatitude was short lived. Uncle Tom found the two and dismissed Douglas; apparently letters back home suggested Crowley was too happy. Alick was returned to the world of guilt and repression. But it was too late. He had tasted real life and wanted more of it.

  Crowley’s next act of sin was his most heinous yet. Sometime in his teens, Crowley seduced the parlor maid on his mother’s bed. It was probably not too difficult; the girl seemed to have designs on Crowley herself. Israel Regardie suggests that this shows that Crowley had Oedipal desires for his mother. This is doubtful: what it tells us is that for Crowley, sex was an act of rebellion. Crowley’s sexual relations with women remained acts of defiance against his Christian-Victorian upbringing, which is why they rarely contained any of the affection and intimacy that, along with sex, make up most male/female relationships. There was something deliciously wicked about sex—there must be, if the Plymouth Brethren disapproved of it—and the fact that Crowley was having it on his mother’s bed made it even more so. For the rest of his life Crowley couldn’t think of sex without feeling a frisson of “forbiddenness,” and a sense that in having it he was shaking his fist at some vague “authority” that prevented him from enjoying himself. The danger, however, in enjoying “forbiddenness” is that it forces you to remain a child, and this, paradoxically, enforces the very authority you are rebelling against. Only a child is interested in doing what some authority tells him he shouldn’t, and only a child gets excited by being “naughty.” (This is why “transgressors” need the normality against which they transgress; they would not be “transgressing” otherwise.) In his attitude toward sex, Crowley remained a child—he was in Jungian terms a puer aeternus, an eternal child, or Peter Pan—and it is no surprise that he later called his coming new age the era of “the crowned and conquering child.”

  The outcome of Crowley’s latest sin also casts him in a bad light. For some reason, the parlor maid told Uncle Tom about their liaison. Crowley denied everything, but Uncle Tom insisted that he prove he was not with her. Crowley got a tobacconist to say that at the time the girl said she was with Alick, he was actually in his shop, buying tobacco. This, too, was forbidden, but Crowley feigned remorse and said bad companions had led him astray. Accepting guilt for this imaginary but lesser crime was a clever ploy. Uncle Tom believed him, and the girl was seen as a liar and dismissed. Crowley had shaken his fist at authority, gotten rid of the girl he had seduced, and come away innocent. It was a tactic of getting others to take the blame for his actions that served him well in later life.

  Crowley tells us that at some point during his descent into sin, his mother was so scandalized by his behavior that she called him the Beast 666, from the Book of Revelation. The story may be apocryphal—he doesn’t mention his mother’s fateful christening until nearly the midpoint of the Confessions—and as we’ve seen, Crowley himself was a fan of the Beast from early on.36 No doubt he spoke with his mother about his sense of identification with this demonic individual; since there was little else but the Bible to discuss, it was bound to come up. Children, we know, need role models. Crowley had one with his father, then lost him. Uncle Tom wasn’t in the running and so this station fell to this mythical embodiment of all that was anti-Christian. If indeed Emily Crowley was responsible for her son’s satanic self-image, he did his mother proud and lived up to this sobriquet with gusto.

  —

  CROWLEY’S REBELLION CONTINUED as he made his way out of his teens. At sixteen he was sent to Malvern public school in Worcestershire, where he stayed for three terms. The school proved just as bad as the one in Cambridge. (A public school in England is a fee-paying one as opposed to a free state school.) Crowley soon learned that in order to protect himself, he had to use the same tactics as those of his enemies. In order to avoid a beating by a prefect—another student given some authority over his peers, rather like a trustee in prison—Crowley found himself in the housemaster’s office, pouring out accusations against the prefect and the rest of his schoolmates. Crowley claims this snitching was only in self-defense, but the fact that he informed on all his schoolmates and not only the prefect suggests that he was trying to “get in good” with the authorities. His “orgy of tale-telling” understandably made him unpopular and in 1892 his mother was forced to take him out.37

  At the public school in Tonbridge in Kent, where he was next sent, things were not much better, but at seventeen Crowley had recovered his health and was turning into an athletic, formidable figure who could throw his weight around. He felt that he possessed a “natural aristocracy” that made people fear him. This only fueled his pursuit of the unforgivable sin even more, and he added another notch to his belt when he caught gonorrhea from a Glasgow prostitute. Crowley was fast becoming a fin de siècle juvenile delinquent, a late-Victorian “rebel without a pause,” who was not particularly liked by his schoolmates, and though capable, did not apply himself to his studies. Like most intelligent people, he was bored with whatever didn’t interest him. After Tonbridge his mother sent him to live with a Plymouth Brethren family in Eastbourne, overlooking the English Channel. Beachy Head, his early favorite climbing place, was nearby. He attended Eastbourne College, where he developed an interest in and a talent for science, assisting the chemistry professor in the laboratory. Crowley’s methodical mind was well suited for scientific work, and it is interesting to consider the possibility that, had he not decided on a career of sin, he would have made a good scientist. In later years the analogies he uses when trying to explain his philosophical and metaphysical beliefs are usually couched in mathematical and chemical terms. Another lifelong interest that developed in Eastbourne was chess. Crowley taught himself the game and he soon became the best player in town, beating the local champion and contributing a chess column to a local newspaper. Chess, like science and mathematics, also requires a methodical, logical mind and that Crowley excelled at it—at one point he even saw it as a career—suggests that his own talents lay more in that direction than in the one he actually chose in life.

  At Eastbourne, too, his interest in climbing became a passion. On a trip to Skye in Scotland, he went rock climbing. In Langdale, in Cumbria, in the northwest of England, he climbed four of the highest fells in one day. The great outdoors suited Crowley; he enjoyed its rigors throughout his life, a sign that for all his later drug-filled adventures, he had a basic appetite for healthy exertion. Between 1894 and 1898 he made several excursions to the Alps, traveling with a tutor to the Suldenthal in the Austrian Tyrol. He became a remarkable, if unorthodox, climber, and could have made a lasting mark as a mountaineer. Even John Symonds, generally seen as a critic of Crowley, can’t avoid mentioning that climbing authorities such as A. F. Mummery, H. V. Reade, and others ranked Crowley high as a climber.38

  It was on one of his climbing excursions to the Lake District that Crowley met one of the few people for whom he felt real respect and loyalty, the German-born mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein.39 Seventeen years older than Crowley—hence a perfect father figure—Eckenstein was an experienced climber. Like Crowley, he was an eccentric character. Born in 1859 to a German sociologist father and an English mother, Eckenstein took degrees in chemistry in London
and Bonn; he later worked as a railway engineer. Like Crowley, he had a taste for mathematics and shared with his young friend an insistence on exactitude. Eckenstein dressed oddly for the time, wearing straw sandals, and like Crowley was a fan of Sir Richard Burton, the explorer (Eckenstein later donated his large collection of Burton’s books, documents, and other items to the Royal Asiatic Society). Eckenstein also had an interest in psychic phenomena, such as telepathy, and there is some suggestion that at some point in his career he may have studied under a Sufi master. Crowley claimed that along with the art of mountaineering—he was, Crowley said, “the best all-round man in England” and “the greatest climber of his age”—Eckenstein taught him how to use his mind properly, to concentrate, and Eckenstein’s instructions in visualization aided Crowley’s later magical work.

  In the end, however, Eastbourne did not prove suitable for the young Beast. Crowley found himself in the middle of a dispute among the Plymouth Brethren family he was staying with. One of the daughters, whom he describes as “beautiful, voluptuous and normal,” was engaged to a young man who wasn’t a Plymouth Brethren.40 To agree to the marriage, the family insisted that their daughter’s suitor convert to their creed. The young man found that he could not. When he informed the family, an uproar ensued and he was summarily thrown out. From then on, the daughter was subject to continued abuse—“meals were a poisoned whirlwind”—and at one point, Crowley voiced some misgivings. The abuse was then aimed at him; Crowley even suggests the family attacked him physically. Asserting his natural aristocracy, Crowley—at least according to his account—soon had them cowed and left. He pleaded with the girl to leave her home and go to her fiancé. That her brutish family should destroy her love was insufferable to him; this sentimentality informed his later poetry but not his actual relationships. But she was too beaten down to oppose them. The family sent a telegram to Uncle Tom and Crowley was soon on his way home.

  The one good thing to come of the incident was that his family realized that he had become too big for them to control. “The best thing they could do,” they saw, “was to let me go my own way.”41 This, in essence, became the kernel of Crowley’s later philosophy. Years later, when he had been thrown out of his abbey by Mussolini and was trying to kick heroin in Tunis, North Africa, Crowley wrote to his faithful disciple Norman Mudd complaining that the authorities were incessantly thwarting his plans to liberate humanity. “The essential for ourselves,” he told Mudd, “is to put a stop absolutely to this damned impertinent interference with us.”42 That “impertinent” conveys Crowley’s aristocratic sense and in the context—exiled, strung out, and broke—is almost comic. But this was the aim of his entire magical system. He should be left to do what he wanted. “The word of sin is restriction,” Crowley told the world a decade after this family squabble. The source of this doubtful maxim was, Crowley tells us, a superior extrahuman intelligence, but its roots were in a very human affair and they were planted in a very human teenager in Eastbourne.

  Crowley had by this time developed a love of poetry. His early reading was strictly supervised by his mother. Reading on Sunday was forbidden. Of contemporary authors, he was allowed Sir Walter Scott, enormously popular in Crowley’s childhood, and some Charles Dickens. David Copperfield, however, was banned because one of the characters, Little Em’ly, shared his mother’s name, and to read of this “naughty girl” would be disrespectful. One tutor was disciplined for reading Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner aloud after dinner. The Ancient Mariner “blesses unawares” the water snakes following his ship; snakes are cursed in Genesis, his mother explained, and were responsible for Original Sin. We can appreciate Crowley’s resentment. Crowley suggests that the real reason his mother was offended was because of the sexual connotations of snakes. She no doubt had some Freudian dreams and as his mother was a “rather sensual type of woman,” her frustrations came out in warped ways. “Sexual repression had driven her as nearly as possible to the borders of insanity,” he tells us.43 Crowley’s growing polymorphously perverse attitude to sex can, then, be seen as a safeguard against insanity.

  It may have been his mother’s reaction to Coleridge that led Crowley to poetry’s door, but it soon became of “paramount importance.” Oddly, Crowley avoided Shakespeare—England’s other “greatest poet”—precisely because he was allowed to read him, and came to him only by chance. Milton’s Paradise Lost bored him, but it at least allowed him to “gloat” over the figure of Satan and chortle about his sin. Longfellow and Tennyson, however, were, according to him, not even poets.

  Crowley was expected to become an evangelist, but he also had to adopt some profession, and a medical career was suggested. This sparked an early poem about an ailing woman who was “rotting away.” “The lupus is over her face and head / Filthy and foul and horrid and dread / And her shrieks they would almost wake the dead /Rotting away!”44 The execution improved but the theme—death, decay, “the worms gnawing the tissues foul”—would not alter much. It is the kind of thing we might expect from a clever, talented schoolboy, but Crowley produced verse like this for the rest of his life. Another early work took the side of Florence Maybrick, who was accused of murdering her husband in 1891 because of an adulterous affair she was having. She was sentenced to death but this was later commuted to life imprisonment. The evidence against her was inconclusive and the case became a cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic (Florence was American). Many believed Florence was innocent, yet Crowley’s inspiration for writing the poem had nothing to do with a miscarriage of justice but with Florence being an adulteress. “The mere fact” of this “thrilled” Crowley “to the marrow.” Adultery was the “summit of wickedness” and that was enough for him.45

  After his expulsion from Eastbourne in the summer of 1895, Crowley took a trip on his own to the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland. Crowley had already visited the Alps the year before and he had joined the Scottish Mountaineering Club, but although he was certainly qualified, he was refused membership to the prestigious English Alpine Club. Crowley suggests the club was jealous of his ability, but most likely his self-assertive personality put them off; throughout his life, Crowley had nothing but disdain for them. As with his natural talent for science, Crowley seems to have been a born climber, and the solitude, quiet, and freedom seem to have brought out the best in him. There he discovered that “the problem of life was not how to satanize, as Huysmans would have called it”—he refers to J. K. Huysmans’s decadent Satanic classic Là-bas—but “simply to escape from the oppressor and enjoy the world without any interference of spiritual life of any sort.” Crowley found that his “happiest moments were when I was alone on the mountains,” and that this happiness in no way derived from mysticism. “The beauty of form and colour, the physical exhilaration of exercise, and the mental stimulation of finding one’s way in difficult country formed the sole elements of my rapture.” At this point Crowley achieves an insight into his psychology that one can only regret did not register more firmly. “So far as I indulged in daydreams,” he tells us, “they were exclusively of a normal sexual type. There was no need to create phantasms of a perverse or unrealizable satisfaction”—the “forbiddenness” and “ultimate sin” he pursued. “It is important to emphasize this point,” he continues, “because I have always appeared to my contemporaries as a very extraordinary individual obsessed by fantastic passions. But such were not in any way natural to me. The moment the pressure was relieved every touch of the abnormal was shed off instantly. The impulse to write poetry disappeared almost completely at such periods.”46

  This is a remarkable passage. Not only does it tell us that poetry did not come naturally to England’s other “greatest poet,” but that his incentive for writing it had little to do with his “real self” and practically everything to do with his “self-image.” Crowley’s insight is tantamount to an admission that he was not really a poet. What real poet wouldn’t sing the beauty of the heights? It also tells us that Cro
wley’s persona of the Beast 666 was a response to other people. This was a problem he was saddled with throughout his life. Crowley was always conscious of other people and how they perceived him; hence the alter egos he adopted. He needed to “show off,” to get people to agree that he was something special—Ernest Becker’s “object of primary importance in the universe.” It was Crowley’s awareness of other people—“the pressure”—that drove him to “satanize,” that is, to shock and scandalize. His poetry did not come from a natural spring within him but was wholly rooted in his desire to have an effect. This is why he is not a great poet and only occasionally a good one. The fact that Crowley didn’t feel the need to write poetry when in the mountains suggests that for him poetry was welded to his personality. We need solitude to escape from our self, because solitude means being alone with your “real self,” not the one obliged to interact with others. Crowley escaped from his self when he was in the mountains, but when he came down to the lowlands, the “pressure” returned and he fell back into the habit of “satanizing.”

  In 1895 Crowley turned twenty. He entered Trinity College Cambridge, taking the Moral Science Tripos, believing that it would help him “to learn something about the nature of things.”47 After the first lecture he never attended another. Crowley spent three years at Cambridge but at the end came away without a degree. To do so, he said, was “unbefitting of and unnecessary to a gentleman.” That Crowley was perfectly qualified to earn a degree is undoubted, but his reasons for not doing so have more to do with his inflated self-regard and natural laziness than anything else. It was not the work that stymied him. It was more an attitude of “I can’t be bothered.” This becomes clear in a remark he made in his diary while recovering from his expulsion from Sicily. He is speaking of chess, but his comments are apt for his entire life. “Once I am sure I have won,” he writes, “I lose interest. I feel the other man ought to resign; I should like to hand the game over to a secretary to finish off for me. This is of course a fault in me, especially as it extends to other matters.”48 It was a tendency to “rest on my oars at the very moment when a spurt would take me past the post,” a feeling that “I needn’t bother about that anymore,” that had its roots in his spoilt childhood.49

 

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