by Gary Lachman
Nevertheless, Crowley’s years at Cambridge were the happiest of his life. For the first time he was entirely on his own. No tutors, no Uncle Tom, no mother. He was triumphant. From now on Crowley could do what he wanted. He took rooms at 16 St. John’s Street, overlooking St. John’s Chapel, and from that moment “an entirely new chapter” began in his life.
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CROWLEY CAME into his inheritance in 1896 when he turned twenty-one. Exactly how much he inherited has been debated, but the figure usually mentioned is £40,000. A pound sterling in 1896 equaled roughly £90 ($150) in today’s currency; by our standards, Crowley would have been a millionaire. But even before he came into his inheritance, Crowley had no money worries, and he blames his later spendthrift ways on his upbringing. “I was taught to expect every possible luxury. Nothing was too good for me and I had no idea what anything cost.” As a youth he was kept short of pocket money, to prevent him from spending it on forbidden things like tobacco, books, or women. But if he wanted to give a dinner party every day of the week, he could. At Cambridge he “still had everything paid for” and he found himself with “unlimited credit.”50
Crowley certainly used his unlimited credit. At Cambridge he dressed as a typical decadent in expensive suits, silk shirts, floppy bow ties—a stylish extravagance shared by his exceedingly sober contemporary Rudolf Steiner—and with large rings adorning his delicate fingers, and he appointed his rooms lavishly, buying many books—Carlyle, Swift, Coleridge, Fielding, Gibbon, Swinburne, Burton, everything forbidden at home. For better or worse, no one applied any brakes to Crowley’s expenditure. He “was never taught that effort on my part might be required to obtain anything I wanted,” and so he “had no sense of responsibility in the matter of money.” With the result that when he did come into his fortune he was “utterly unprepared to use it with the most ordinary prudence, and all the inherent vices of my training had a perfectly free field for their development.”51
Most writers on Crowley find the roots of his later philosophy in his reaction to his “repressive” Plymouth Brethren upbringing. Yet how repressive could his childhood have been if he was taught “to expect every possible luxury”? To my mind this privilege was even more responsible for Crowley’s later profligacy. Crowley’s biggest problem was that everything came to him too easily. He never had to work for anything, and when he finally found himself penniless and left to his own resources—during his difficult years in New York—he was in his forties and the experience was shattering. In the Confessions Crowley wrote that he had “never outgrown the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck”; it was a full, maternal breast waiting for him to feed upon.52 This conveys a fundamentally passive attitude toward life, as if he expected to open his mouth and food would simply fly in.
Crowley’s excesses at Cambridge, however, were not limited to fancy dress and luxurious furnishings. He also found an ample field for pursuing his favorite sin, sex. “My sexual life,” he tells us, “was very intense. My relations with women were entirely satisfactory.” They gave him the “maximum of bodily enjoyment” and at the same time “symbolized my theological notions of sin.” “Love,” he declares, “was a challenge to Christianity” and every woman he met enabled him to defy the “tyranny of the Plymouth Brethren.”53 Crowley was now on his own and free from this tyranny: why did he still feel the need to “defy” anything? As other independent young minds were doing, couldn’t he jettison the religion of his past and simply enjoy sex for the pleasurable experience it was, rather than as some diabolical act? “Free love” and other sexually “liberating” ideas had been topics of heated debate for some time. Annie Besant, a leading Theosophist and one of Crowley’s later bêtes noires, had even been arrested for publishing a book on birth control (with Charles Bradlaugh in 1877), and Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and other writers were openly arguing for more modern, “liberated” attitudes toward sex. But taking this progressive, reasonable approach would have meant weaning himself from the spice of sin, and by now Crowley was too hooked to give it up.
Crowley’s appreciation of women was entirely of their ability to satisfy his sensual appetite and to inspire his poetry. That is, as sexual objects and as muses, certainly not as human beings, an attitude that remained with him throughout his life. “Morally and mentally,” he writes, “women were for me beneath contempt. They had no moral ideals. They were bound up with their necessary preoccupation, with the function of reproduction . . . Intellectually, of course, they did not exist.”54 Yet this did not deter him. “On the contrary, it was highly convenient that one’s sexual relations should be with an animal with no consciousness beyond sex.”55 Crowley found forty-eight hours of abstinence “sufficient to dull the fine edge of my mind” and complained of the time he had to spend in hunting down “what ought to have been brought to the back door every evening with the milk!”56
How this attitude affected the women in his life may be imagined, but Crowley’s sexual relations were not confined to the intellectually vacant sex for long. An experience in Stockholm on New Year’s Eve 1896 seems to have revealed to Crowley his predilection for sex with other men. It was then that he was “awakened to the knowledge that I possessed a magical means of becoming conscious of and satisfying a part of my nature which had to that moment concealed itself from me.” The experience was one of “horror and pain” and “ghostly terror,” but it also provided the “purest and holiest spiritual experience that exists.”57 Crowley does not go into detail and his language is purposefully obscure, but with Crowley, “magical” is often a code word for “sexual.” When he writes of seducing the parlor maid on his mother’s bed, he speaks of making his “magical affirmation.” At this point in his life, however, Crowley had yet to begin his magical career, and so his use of “magical” in speaking of his Stockholm experience cannot be taken literally. The conjunction of “horror,” “pain,” and “terror” with the “purest and holiest spiritual experience” is suggestive of the way Crowley wrote about his homosexual magical “operas” later on. In later years Crowley took the passive role in his XIo or homosexual magical workings, an expression of his appetite for masochism and humiliation; one remembers his early thrills in fantasizing about Nana Sahib and his “proud, fierce, cruel, sensual profile.” Most likely what happened on New Year’s Eve in Stockholm in 1896 was that Crowley allowed himself to be sodomized and discovered that he enjoyed it.58
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HIS RETICENCE ABOUT this mysterious awakening also informed his first homosexual relationship. In October 1897 Crowley met Herbert Charles Pollitt. He was four years older than Crowley—typically, in the Confessions Crowley says he was ten years older—and had earned notoriety as a female impersonator. Pollitt performed for the Cambridge Footlights Dramatic Club, posing as “Diane de Rougy,” a pastiche of the Parisian dancer Liane de Pougy, a Folies Bergère entertainer famous in her day. Crowley wrote of Pollitt’s hair: “he wore it rather long . . . its colour was pale gold, like spring sunshine, and its texture was of the finest gossamer.” Yet Crowley says Pollitt had a tragic face that emphasized the hunger of his eyes and the sadness of his mouth. Crowley downplays the physical relationship between them, and speaks of the “first intimate friendship” of his life, “the purest and noblest relation I had ever had with anybody.” There is no talk of making “magical affirmations” with Pollitt. But one gets the impression that, however intimate, Pollitt was a separate addition to Crowley’s life, and that he went on pursuing his other interests—poetry, mountaineering—“as if I had never met him.” Eventually he broke from Pollitt. Pollitt was close friends with the artist Aubrey Beardsley, who, with Oscar Wilde, was a leading figure of the “decadent movement.” Like many of that generation, Pollitt “represented eternal dissatisfaction” and had a desperate outlook on life.59 Crowley, however, was “determined to make my dreams come true.”
Crowley is disingenuous when he says that he resisted the infl
uence of the decadent school that Pollitt introduced him to. He was obsessed with many of the same themes as the decadents were. His first published poem, Aceldama: A Place to Bury Strangers In, was privately printed in 1898 by Leonard Smithers—a friend of Pollitt’s and publisher of Wilde—in an edition of one hundred sumptuously produced copies, paid for by Crowley himself. This vanity production is suffused with much of the sentiment that Crowley tells us he rejected. The title comes from the field where Judas hanged himself after betraying Christ and, predictably, the setting is a brothel. It fits, as one critic has remarked, the fin de siècle mode of “dark, tragic, blood-smeared musings.”60
Aceldama seems to express the sense of pointlessness common to the time, a spiritual nausea at a meaningless cosmos. Crowley writes, “I crept, a stealthy hungry soul, to grasp / Its vast edge, to look to the beyond.” But when the poet does look beyond the edge of the cosmos, all he sees is “Nothing, Nothing, Nothing!” There is also a sense in which Crowley seems to conflate spiritual experience with homosexuality, a union he may have encountered in Stockholm. Sprouting wings the poet climbs to the infinite, where “all power, light, life, motion concentrate.” And there he finds “God dwelling / Strong immaculate / He knew me and he loved! / His lips anoint / My lips with love . . .”61 Sex and the spirit, sensuality and asceticism vie for the poet’s faith. Blasphemy, degradation, masochism abound. Crowley believed that with the poem he had “attained, at a bound, the summit of Parnassus,” but it is clear he had landed in its well-trodden foothills. Crowley himself must have recognized this. In 1910 Crowley issued a selection of his poetry in “response to a widely spread lack of interest in my writings.” More than a decade had passed and the hunger for recognition was still unsatisfied, but nothing from Aceldama, which he believed placed him among the poetic gods, was included in his Ambergris (1910).
Typically, his nom de plume for his maiden work was “A Gentleman of the University of Cambridge,” nicking the pseudonym from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous The Necessity of Atheism (1811), which was authored by “a Gentleman of the University of Oxford.” Aceldama was not well received—it garnered one review that suggested it should not be read by the young—but one enthusiastic reader played an important part in Crowley’s life. Gerald Kelly, who later became Sir Gerald Kelly and a president of the Royal Academy, was intrigued by this strange gentleman of the university and visited him in his rooms. The two became friends and continued to meet in London after they left university. Yet even with all his affinities to the “steamy, sex-soaked vapours” of the decadents, Crowley did have a fundamental toughness and, odd to say, health, that made him turn his back on them and Pollitt.62 Pollitt in any case had no interest in Crowley’s poetry or his spiritual aspirations and it’s no mystery Crowley moved on.
Some biographers have criticized Crowley for not coming out of the closet and affirming his homosexuality, which at the time was illegal, but his circumspection may have sources other than prudent self-regard. A related question is Crowley’s attitude toward Oscar Wilde. One would think Wilde would have been a hero of his. But precisely this may be the key. Crowley’s high opinion of himself could not accept his being regarded as merely a Wilde clone, and it has to be said that much of Crowley’s poetry and his lust for the forbidden and antagonism toward Christian morality is very reminiscent of Wilde. Wilde’s trial for “gross indecency”—homosexuality—took place in 1895, the year Crowley went to Cambridge, and Crowley’s remarks about Wilde in the Confessions are mostly negative. Crowley suggests that Wilde became homosexual because he was a snob and it was a way to meet the “right people”; it was, Crowley infers, a “career move.” Ironically, his remark that Wilde had “adopted the standards of the English middle class, and thought to become distinguished by the simple process of outraging them” can very easily be laid at Crowley’s own door, as can his belief that Wilde “was not true to himself.”63 His remarks about Wilde’s writing also suggest a petulant envy. Crowley may have wanted to distance himself from Wilde out of a certain prudence but also because he realized that much of his own creative efforts were a kind of Wilde warmed up. In his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891), Wilde writes of the “true personality of man” in a way that presages Crowley’s ideas about the “true will” remarkably.64
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ASIDE FROM COMMITTING the unforgivable sin—and any others he could along the way—at twenty-one Crowley was still unsure of what to do with his life. For a time he thought of entering the diplomatic service. Imperial Russia attracted him and during his vacation of 1897 he visited St. Petersburg. But although courtly intrigue was fascinating—and he later enjoyed playacting as a spy—the diplomatic life didn’t appeal. He had also considered making a career of chess, and on the return trip from Russia he stopped in Berlin and attended a chess conference. He was not impressed. He was struck with the revelation—he calls it a mystical experience—that he was not put on this planet to be a chess master. Like the hero of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Crowley found himself an intelligent, strong-willed, and capable individual, with no idea what to do with his talents. A profound depression came over him. All human effort seemed pointless; the deep truth of Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas (“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”) became painfully clear; it was this nihilism that informed Aceldama. A diplomat, a chess master, even a great poet: all would be forgotten within a century or two. Even a Shakespeare or a Napoleon would amount to nothing when the Earth and the entire cosmos were eventually destroyed. What was the point? Crowley embraced the Buddha’s grim truth, that “everything is sorrow.” This spiritual nihilism stayed with him the rest of his life—“nothing matters” is frequently the punch line to Crowley’s musings—but something in him resisted this feeling of inconsequence. “I must find a material in which to work which is resistant to the forces of change,” he told himself.65
We may feel that this is an expression of Crowley’s need to be an “object of primary importance in the universe,” but there is more to his insight than that. Crowley grasped the Platonic truth that while the material world is destined for decay, the world of the mind, of the spirit, can transcend this corruption and achieve a kind of immortality. “Spiritual facts,” Crowley saw, “were the only things worthwhile.” We must chalk up this insight to the part of Crowley that was great, and it is this sort of intuition that prevents us from relegating him to the status of a mere crank. Crowley was onto something real. Suddenly the meaning and purpose of his life became clear. “I had never given myself wholly to chess, mountaineering or even to poetry,” he thought, but now Crowley had a plan. He had perceived the “worthlessness of the world.” He now devoted himself to what he called the “escape from matter” and a “definite invasion of the spiritual world.”
But no sooner had he embraced this insight than Crowley subjected it to his peculiar logic. His scientific mind required “first-hand sensory evidence of spiritual beings,” not recognizing the oxymoronic character of this demand, as by definition “spiritual beings” are not “sensory.” But Crowley went further. The spiritual world for him meant angels on one side and devils on the other. Crowley had sided with Satan, so it was only natural that his first step in his new life was to “get into personal communication with the devil.”66
To side with the devil for the sake of the spiritual seems odd. But Crowley’s spirituality is of the antinomian school; it embraces the idea that the spiritually awakened person is no longer subject to laws, is, indeed, “beyond good and evil.” This confusion between heaven and hell, good and evil, the spiritual and the satanic was at the heart of Aceldama. “It was a windy night, that memorable seventh night of December, when this philosophy was born in me. How the grave old professor wondered at my ravings!” Crowley writes. “I was in the death struggle with self: God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered—now I have only one doubt left—which of the twain was God?”
Yet on a more immediate leve
l, Crowley the literalist wanted something to do. He was not content with mere poetry, with echoing the kind of satanic verses other decadents had already voiced. Crowley’s decision to get a “manual of practical technical instruction” and devote himself to “black magic” was surely rooted in his taste for the “impossible.”67 In that century of progress, reason, and rationality, surely no one believed that it was possible to evoke devils. No? Well, Crowley the impossibilist would prove them wrong.
He found what he was looking for in Arthur Edward Waite’s ponderous classic, The Book of Black Magic and Pacts. Typically, Crowley later had nothing good to say about Waite, and vilified him every chance he got; he is among the Golden Dawn crew Crowley eviscerates in Moonchild. According to Crowley, Waite is “not only the most ponderously platitudinous and priggishly prosaic of pretentiously pompous pork butchers of the language, but the most voluminously voluble.”68 This not only tells us that Crowley is unforgiving, even to the man who put him on the road to adeptship, but it also highlights one of the worst faults in Crowley’s own “pork butchery” of the language, his taste for alliteration. It is impossible to read much of Crowley without coming across this habit of his, which to him must have seemed poetic but to most readers is simply indulgent. Waite is a poor stylist, but Crowley often is, too, his claims to being a “master” of the English language notwithstanding. Yet worse than this is the fact that decades after he read Waite’s book, Crowley still can’t forgive Waite for actually helping him in his career.