by Gary Lachman
Waite’s book hinted at the existence of a Hidden Church, where the rites of true initiation were maintained. When Crowley wrote to Waite, the pork butcher replied by suggesting Crowley read The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary, an eighteenth-century classic of Christian mysticism by Karl von Eckartshausen, a friend of the great French mystic Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, who wrote as “the unknown philosopher.”69 Crowley read the book during the Easter vacation of 1898, which he spent with Pollitt in Wastdale Head, a rock-climbing area in the Lake District. Eckartshausen spoke of a secret, hidden church, a congregation of the elect, an inner circle of adepts devoted to the noble cause of truth. Crowley’s new passion for the spiritual world and his aristocratic sense were hooked. Nothing else mattered now except to find that church and enter its ranks.
His opportunity came while he was in the mountains. In the summer of 1898—he had already left Cambridge—Crowley was with Eckenstein in the Alps. The weather was bad and climbing was impossible, even for Crowley. He had brought along a book that he found incomprehensible but which fascinated him for that very reason. It was a translation of a work by the seventeenth-century Silesian cabalist Knorr von Rosenroth, the Kabbala Denudata, or The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S. L. MacGregor Mathers. The translator of this strange work of Jewish-Christian mysticism proved to be one of the most important people in Crowley’s life. Crowley says his health was bad that summer and so, with climbing out of the question, he left camp for Zermatt. Here he held court in a beer hall, pontificating on the mysteries of alchemy, about which he knew practically nothing. But someone there that night did. An Englishman and chemist, Julian Baker, spoke to him afterward, and explained that he was, in fact, a practicing alchemist. Baker explained that he had prepared “fixed mercury,” a considerable achievement in the ancient art. Crowley felt fate had arrived. Ever since reading The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary, Crowley was determined to gain entry into its Hidden Church. That Easter he had sent out a mystical SOS, asking for a Master to come and take him by the hand. It seemed his call had been answered. When he parted from Baker that evening, he resolved to speak with him the next morning about his spiritual search.
But the next morning he discovered that Baker had left the hotel. No one knew where he was. Crowley would not let this opportunity slip away. He telegraphed all over the valley. Baker had been seen at some locations, but when Crowley arrived, he was gone. Yet the impossibilist was not deterred. Crowley discovered that an Englishman fitting Baker’s description was heading down the valley toward Brique. Crowley followed and caught up with Baker some ten miles below Zermatt. He told the chemist of his search for the Hidden Church and the secret saints. He must have been convincing. Baker told him of a group in London who might be of interest to him. He also said that he knew someone who was much more of a magician than he was, and that he would introduce Crowley to him when they met again in London. Crowley’s SOS had been heard. The shadows of a golden dawn were drawing in. If a new life had started for Crowley when he entered Cambridge, it was destiny itself that beckoned now.
TWO
TWILIGHT OF THE GOLDEN DAWN
The year 1898 was an important one for Crowley. Along with Aceldama, Crowley wrote and self-published several other works that year, all in sumptuous editions: The Tale of Archais, The Poem, Jezebel, Songs of the Spirit, Jephthah, and White Stains. Jephthah, a verse play, is interesting in the context of Crowley’s inability to edit himself or accept editing from someone else, or even to absorb helpful criticism, a dangerous resistance in a writer. As his friend Louis Wilkinson remarked, Crowley was “too sure of his genius to criticize or revise adequately his own work.”1 Soon after his initiation into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—the group that Baker introduced him to—Crowley showed the printer’s proofs of Jephthah to his new magical brother, William Butler Yeats, a leading member of the order. By 1898 Yeats was a recognized author, having already published several important poems. For all his bluster about being England’s “other greatest poet,” Crowley, ten years Yeats’s junior, was hungry for approval. Yeats had already been in the Golden Dawn for almost a decade when Crowley arrived; he had also been a Theosophist, and had met Madame Blavatsky.2 Yeats was a dreamy, romantic personality, sensitive and distant, and Crowley’s self-assertive character no doubt grated on him. Yeats was too polite to say what he felt about the poem—readers can judge it for themselves—and offered some faint encouragement.3 Crowley could not take this lightly—Yeats, of course, should have burst out in praise and robustly clasped the hand of his fellow poet—and decades later in the Confessions Crowley offered the reason for Yeats’s lack of appreciation. It was clear that, after reading a few lines of Jephthah, “black, bilious rage” shook Yeats to his soul because Yeats recognized that Crowley was a much greater poet than he would ever be. In later years Yeats fine-tuned his assessment and admitted that amid much rhetoric, Crowley had written at least six lines of real poetry.
Crowley maintained a venomous animosity toward Yeats for the rest of his life and lost no opportunity to vent it. In Moonchild, Yeats is portrayed as the black magician Gates, whose corpse is used in a hideous ritual, and in Crowley’s story “At the Fork of the Roads,” Yeats is again portrayed as a black magician. No doubt that early snub hurt. One wonders how Crowley felt about Yeats in 1923. That year Crowley was expelled from Sicily by Mussolini, had his name plastered over the tabloids, and was trying to kick heroin. Yeats, his poetic rival, won the Nobel Prize for literature.
White Stains deserves mention because it is an early example of something Crowley enjoyed throughout his life: pornography. This particular collection, which Crowley claimed to be the work of George Archibald Bishop, “a neuropath of the Second Empire”—Bishop, of course, was Uncle Tom’s surname, and Archibald the name of Crowley’s one decent tutor—has been called the “filthiest in the English language.”4 The fact that Crowley’s literary alter ego dies in an asylum after exploring the depths of depravity led Crowley to argue that the book would be a helpful guide for Sunday school students, and would keep them on the straight and narrow: an example of Crowley’s often forced humor.
Connoisseurs of crude erotica and transgression may find some delight in White Stains, and one assumes that the stains in question are of semen. There are poems on bestiality, necrophilia, and even coprophagia, or “scat,” the eating of excrement, and urophagia, the drinking of urine. In “Go Into the Highways and Hedges, and Compel Them to Come In”—taken from Luke 14:23—Crowley writes:
Let my fond lips but drink thy golden wine,
My bright-eyed Arab, only let me eat
The rich brown globes of sacramental meat
Steaming and firm, hot from their home divine . . .
The poem goes on to extol the virtues of licking dirty feet, and Crowley himself would practice coprophagia as part of his attainment of godhood when he finally achieved the magical rank of Ipsissimus in Sicily. Another poem bemoans the inconvenience of “caught clap” (gonorrhea), another sings the virtue of “passive paederasty,” in which “a strong man’s love is my delight”—inspired by his “magical” experience in Stockholm—and another suggests sex with the crucified Christ, an idea that Crowley may have picked up from the sexual mysticism of the eighteenth-century German Count Zinzendorf.5 What White Stains certainly communicates is that Crowley in no way rejected the obsession with depravity that characterized the decadent school that his lover Pollitt had introduced him to; like Aceldama it was published by Pollitt’s friend Leonard Smithers, who specialized in decadent literature.
Crowley’s explanation for why he wrote the book is that he had been reading Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and wanted to prove that sexual perversions were not the result of disease, as Krafft-Ebing believed, but are “magical affirmations of perfectly intelligible points of view.”6 But most readers, I think, will find it difficult to accept eating excrement as an expression of a “perfectly intelligible point of view,” or even as a no doubt peculia
r but understandable erotic practice. In 1924 most of the original printing of White Stains was seized by His Majesty’s customs officials and destroyed.7
That Crowley published his first work of pornography in the same year he was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is instructive. Just as Aceldama expresses a confusion about God and Satan, Crowley’s parallel pursuit of his Holy Guardian Angel and the “unforgivable sin” suggests a similar mix-up. At this point Crowley was pulled by contradictory desires, to become a member of a secret order of saints and a devil worshipper.8 This spiritual confusion begins what we might call Crowley’s practice of “holy sinning,” or his belief in “the sanctity of the foul,” which reaches its apogee during Crowley’s own coprophagia in Cefalù. Some form of “holy sinning” has been a part of the Western spiritual tradition since the Gnostics, who saw the God of the Bible as an evil demiurge, and the world he created as false. One way to loosen the chains of falsehood is through acts of reversal, something we know Crowley did at the age of eleven, when he decided to switch sides in the great battle between Jesus and Satan. This antinomian sentiment has appeared in many forms. In Northern Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Brethren of the Free Spirit believed that God was in everything, and that through a direct experience of God—in the form of the Holy Spirit—we become one with Him and therefore incapable of sin, and so can act as we please. On the face of it this sounds desirable. Yet other forms of “holy sinning” seem less harmless. In 1969 Charles Manson’s “Family,” who also wanted to go beyond good and evil, committed several gruesome murders, which they claimed they did “out of love.” (Nietzsche himself wrote “that which is done out of love always occurs beyond good and evil.”)
We have no hesitation in rejecting Manson’s form of “holy sinning,” but what about Christ, who preferred the company of prostitutes and other riffraff to the self-proclaimed righteous? The problem with “holy sinning” is that it is difficult to tell when you are going beyond good and evil as a saint (Christ) or a sinner (Manson, who often referred to himself as a modern-day Christ). If, as the antinomian view has it, “anything goes”—meaning the norms no longer apply—then very questionable practices can be excused as expressions of a more intense spirituality that the lukewarm adherents to the straight and narrow are too cowardly to pursue. For the rest of his life, Crowley would espouse a philosophy expressing this antinomian rejection of opposites.
That way to godhead began when Crowley arrived in London and looked up the alchemist Julian Baker. Baker soon introduced Crowley to the Welshman George Cecil Jones. Jones, like Baker, was a chemist, and like Baker, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Jones was five years older than Crowley. He was also the son of a suicide and looked remarkably like Christ—or at least like Victorian representations of Christ. Unlike the Victorian Christ, he was an unstable character and possessed a fiery temper. Jones remained a close friend and associate of Crowley’s for more than a decade, and Crowley’s first instructions in magic came from Jones. Jones quickly discovered that Crowley had a natural talent for magic, and that he was ready to devote his life to it. The impossibilist was on the scent, and Jones suggested Crowley join his magical order.
Like the death of his father and his escape from the Plymouth Brethren, Crowley’s initiation into the Golden Dawn was one of the most significant events in his life. “Beyond all other mundane events,” Israel Regardie tells us, “it was the influence of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn that shaped Aleister Crowley’s life.”9 Yet Crowley himself was not that impressed with this tremendous turning point. After imagining the horrors his initiation at Mark Mason’s Hall on Great Queen Street on November 18, 1898, would entail—he asked Julian Baker if anyone had died during the ritual—Crowley was disappointed to discover that the ritual was a mere formality enacted by “muddled middle-class mediocrities.”10 After an elaborate ceremony, at the end of which Crowley was told that, after dwelling long in darkness, he must now “Quit the night and seek the day,” Crowley took the magical name Perdurabo (“I will endure to the end”). Perhaps this enabled him to endure meeting the “abject assemblage of nonentities” that his ten-shilling membership fee entitled him to join. There was the despicable Yeats (Daemon est Deus Inversus—“The Devil Is God Inverted”). There was also the writer Arthur Machen (Filus Aquarti), who was no nonentity, having made a name for himself a few years earlier with his decadent novella The Great God Pan, considered one of the classic horror tales of the “gaslight” age. William Westcott (Non Omnis Moriar), one of the founders of the order, had been a member of the Inner Order of Madame Blavatsky’s exclusive Esoteric Order. Florence Farr (Sapientia Sapienti Dono Data) was a famous West End actress and women’s rights activist. The pork butcher of English A. E. Waite (Sacramentum Regis Abscondere Bonun Est), another member, was by then the author of several works on magic. The philanthropist and tea-heiress Annie Horniman (Fortiter et Recte) was another member. There were others, too; a full list can be found in one of the many accounts of the order’s history. Crowley’s slur that none of the members he met that day “made any mark in the world” is simply untrue and is another example of Crowley’s self-serving rewriting of history.
We can also recognize Crowley’s naivety. During his Cambridge days, Crowley had already joined two other groups before he found the Golden Dawn. The Celtic Church, whose pillars were “Chivalry and Mystery,” attracted him for a time and made him fantasize about the Holy Grail, while the Spanish Legitimist movement—which aimed to put the pretender Don Carlos on the Spanish throne—made him think of himself as a man of action; he even learned how to use a machine gun in preparation for an invasion of Spain. Both of these possibilities petered out and Crowley was still hankering for some romantic future. After reading Eckartshausen’s The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary, Crowley expected to find himself in a mystery-enshrouded hidden temple, far removed from the daily round, not in an ordinary Masonic lodge next door to Covent Garden. Crowley wanted the spiritual equivalent of his “unforgivable sin,” not a rented hall occupied by ordinary people who, like himself, had an interest in magic. With romantic expectations like these, practically anything that could have happened that day would have been a letdown.
Years later, when writing his Confessions, Crowley recognized that his snobbery was inappropriate. But at the time he felt he already knew more about magic than the cabal of mediocrities he was introduced to, and no doubt his natural sense of superiority was evident to them, too. In the end he felt some respect for only two members: the head of the order, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, the eccentric translator of The Kabbalah Unveiled, which Crowley read in the Alps before meeting Julian Baker; and Allan Bennett, who, along with Oscar Eckenstein, was one of the few people Crowley never had a bad word for. (Oddly enough, as Israel Regardie points out, all three—Crowley, Eckenstein, and Bennett—were asthmatic.)
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THE HERMETIC ORDER of the Golden Dawn was the most famous magical society of the modern age. Although most likely apocryphal, the most well-known account of its origins concerns a cipher manuscript discovered in a secondhand bookstall in London’s Farringdon Road.11 The Reverend Alphonsus Woodford, who wrote about Freemasonry, is said to have found the manuscript; he could make nothing of it, and so gave it to his friend and fellow mason William Westcott, who was a member of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, or the Rosicrucian Society in England. Westcott called in Mathers, another Mason, to help. They cracked the cipher—invented by the fifteenth-century German monk and occultist Johannes Trithemius—and saw that it contained magical rituals. It also contained a letter from a Fraulein Anna Sprengel in Nuremberg, with her address, saying that if more information about the cipher was needed, it could be had from her. Westcott corresponded with Fraulein Sprengel and asked about the rituals. She claimed to be the head of a magical order, Die Golden Dämmerung, “The Golden Dawn,” and she gave Westcott a charter to start a branch of the society in England. In the autumn
of 1887, Westcott, Mathers, and Dr. William Woodman inaugurated the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the Isis a nod, perhaps, to Westcott’s previous esoteric teacher, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, whose first major work was the hugely influential Isis Unveiled. The actual charter from Fraulein Sprengel did not arrive until March 1888. It was unsigned, so Westcott signed it himself. Mathers was given the task of completing the fragments of ritual that the cipher contained. These were of an initiatory character. The cipher also contained material on the trumps of the tarot deck and some other magical materials.
Fraulein Sprengel, the story goes, died in 1891, and Westcott’s last letter to her was answered by her magical associates. They took a dim view of her activities and, in short, said her English correspondents could expect no more help from them. They had already been given enough information to carry on themselves, and if they needed more, they would have to contact the Secret Chiefs on their own. These mysterious Secret Chiefs were the true heads of their order.
The Secret Chiefs occupy the same position in the Western magical tradition that the Hidden Masters or Mahatmas do in Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy. They are beings of a higher spiritual nature with miraculous powers—supermen—who clandestinely watch over humanity and guide it in its evolution. Blavatsky always insisted that her Masters were actual men who had developed their dormant powers, not beings from another dimension, as Crowley and others would claim.12 But whoever the Secret Chiefs were, at this point, the only person they were speaking to was the head of the order, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. By 1898 Woodman had died and Westcott had been forced to leave the order. Some papers Westcott left in a hansom cab that spoke of his magical pursuits came to the attention of his superiors at the London Coroner’s office, and they explained that if he wished to keep his job, he would have to give up magic. This left Mathers in sole command. Like George Cecil Jones, Mathers (Deo Duce Comite Ferro—“God My Guide, My Companion a Sword”) had a fiery temperament and his dictatorial leadership style and later favoring of Crowley eventually led to a schism in the order. He claimed that in 1892 he had made direct contact with the Secret Chiefs and that this conferred on him sole authority. His account of the experience is worth noting. Mathers wrote that “I can only compare it to the continued effect of that usually experienced momentarily by any person close to whom a flash of lightning passes during a violent storm; coupled with a difficulty in respiration similar to the half-strangling effect produced by ether.”13