by Gary Lachman
Mathers had been the curator of the prestigious Horniman Museum in South London, but an argument with Frederick J. Horniman, his boss, led to his dismissal. Annie Horniman, Frederick’s daughter and a Golden Dawn initiate, gave Mathers a pension of £443 a year and with this he went to Paris, where he haunted the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. Mathers claimed that while walking through the Bois de Boulogne, a large park on the western edge of the city, he met three Secret Chiefs who told him that he was their representative and sole channel of authority for the Golden Dawn. This claim, coupled with the fact that Mathers was leading the order from a different city, led to great dissatisfaction with his leadership. Crowley’s appearance acted as a catalyst and in little more than a year the order fractured.
Like Crowley, Mathers was an eccentric character, mixing an obsession with magic with another passion, military history. Like Crowley, he was a vivid fantasist. Mathers joined a volunteer infantry group and was photographed in a lieutenant’s uniform. Mathers didn’t have that rank but the photograph was a means of supporting his self-image as an officer. Mathers adopted MacGregor as a name in the middle of the Celtic craze that led Crowley to join the Celtic Church. Mathers was photographed in Highland regalia, but he had no Scottish blood. He was born in London’s East End in 1854, the son of a clerk; he never set foot in Scotland until 1897, and then only to inspect a Golden Dawn branch in Edinburgh. He also called himself the “Count of Glenstrae,” showing a taste for unwarranted titles that Crowley would soon also display.
In 1887 Mathers met Moina Bergson, sister of the philosopher Henri Bergson, in the British Museum, and they soon married. Moina was an art student at the Slade School; she was also psychic and Mathers often used her powers when he needed to contact the Secret Chiefs. Crowley, too, employed female seers when he needed to contact the higher planes. As with Mathers, it was Crowley’s wife who provided a direct line to the Secret Chiefs. Yeats, who met Mathers in the early 1890s, called him a “figure of romance.” Once, Yeats met Mathers when he was wearing Highland dress and had knives stuck into his stockings. He told the poet, “When I’m dressed like this I feel like a walking flame.”14 Much of the Golden Dawn magic, as well as Crowley’s, has to do with what is called the “assumption of the god form,” when the magician imagines he has become the particular god he wants to invoke by visualizing his form enveloping his own. Mathers’s habit of photographing himself in fancy dress can be seen as a less magical version of this, as Crowley’s early playacting can be seen as a preparation for it.
It would be easy to dismiss Mathers as a deluded fantasist, but like Crowley, Mathers had some natural talent for magic. Yeats recounts how Mathers handed him cards with Hindu tattwa symbols on them, representing the five elements—fire, water, air, earth, and spirit—used in Golden Dawn training, and told him to press them against his forehead. When Yeats did, images came to him involuntarily, each one appropriate for each symbol. The fire symbol, a red triangle, raised a vision of a black giant rising up out of ruins in a desert. Mathers told him it was a being of the order of salamanders, whose element is fire. Yeats later wondered if telepathy might account for this, but ruled this out when he discovered that if he gave someone the wrong card—say water, a silver crescent, instead of air, a blue circle—they nevertheless received the correct vision for that card. The symbols themselves seem to possess some power, and in his essay “The Trembling of the Veil,” Yeats wrote that it was through Mathers that he was convinced that “images well up before the mind’s eyes from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory,” a remarkable anticipation of Jung’s notion of the “collective unconscious.” At a session with Mathers and Moina, Yeats discovered that he would visualize what Moina would describe even before she began to describe it. Somehow they had entered a kind of group or shared mind or, more magically, a section of the astral plane.
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CROWLEY, TOO, felt like a walking flame at times, or at least wanted to. As in the case of Eckenstein, he saw in Mathers another father figure. There were strong similarities between them. Aside from being fantasists, they both had athletic physiques. Yeats tells the story of how a boxing partner of Mathers’s was surprised that he could knock him down, even though Mathers was the larger man; he later discovered that Mathers, perpetually in poverty, was starving at the time. Both were unwilling or unable to brook any criticism. Both sought power and control. Both had paranoid suspicions about the people around them and often bit the hand that fed—indeed, they often made a banquet of it. In Paris, around the time of Crowley’s initiation, Mathers had begun performing public rituals of Egyptian Masses celebrating Isis that he had discovered in his researches. Moina acted as the high priestess and the performances were a success, at least according to the L’Écho du merveilleux, which reviewed them. In 1910, Crowley, we shall see, did the same in London.
The Golden Dawn membership was arranged hierarchically, with ten levels in all, grouped in three sections. This arrangement paralleled that of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Although it was called a hermetic order, and included many Egyptian and Rosicrucian motifs, much of the Golden Dawn’s teaching related to Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mystical tradition. Crowley’s own metaphysical system is Egyptian through and through, but Crowley’s own thinking was well suited to the meticulous classifications peculiar to Kabbalah. This can be seen in his early Kabbalistic work 777, a kind of Linnean filing system of magic, mapping out the correspondences between numbers, the Hebrew alphabet, the Tree of Life, gods, colors, perfumes, stones, planets, astrological signs, demons, and much else. In Kabbalah, existence is arranged in a descending scale, from the purest spiritual manifestation to the rock-solid earth. This scale is depicted as a kind of metaphysical tree, and its branches contain “vessels,” or sephiroth, designed to hold the spiritual energies at work in creation. Starting out from a nonmanifest source, the Ain Soph Aur, or “limitless light,” an indescribable dimension, the divine energies burst into being. From highest to lowest we have Kether (Crown), Chokmah (Wisdom), Binah (Understanding), Chesed (Mercy), Geburah (Strength), Tiphareth (Beauty), Netzach (Victory), Hod (Splendour), Yesod (Foundation), and Malkuth (Kingdom).
With the Golden Dawn system, one begins as a Neophyte 00 = 0, which is not yet on the magical ladder, then moves to Zealator 10 = 10. Next comes Theoricus 20 = 9, Practicus 30 = 8, and Philosophus 40 = 7, which form the grades of the first, or Outer, Order, to which technically the name Golden Dawn applies. The Second Order, that of the Ruby Rose and Gold Cross, a more Rosicrucian-influenced level, includes the degrees of Adeptus Minor 50 = 6, Adeptus Major 60 = 5, and Adeptus Exemptus 70 = 4. In the first order, initiates performed ceremonies and rituals and studied the philosophy of magic, but it was only in the Second Order that actual magic was practiced. No Second Order could exist without direct contact with the Secret Chiefs, which is why Mather’s alleged link with them was so important. The next three grades, Magister Templi (Master of the Temple) 80 = 3, Magus 90 = 2, and Ipsissimus (roughly, one’s “most selfness”) 100 = 1 are separated from the others by what Crowley calls “the Abyss.” These three grades correspond to Binah, Chokmah, and Kether on the Tree of Life, which are known as the “Supernals.” Although not as far removed as the Ain Soph Aur itself, their existence is nevertheless quite beyond any ordinary human conception and can only be understood by crossing the Abyss. The Abyss is a chasm in existence in which our binary, dualistic conceptions dissolve and we either pass through it and enter that mystical realm beyond good and evil where “all is one” that the antinomian aspirant seeks, or plummet into madness. It was in this Third Order that the Secret Chiefs resided. No one in the Golden Dawn had reached this level; Mathers himself got only as far as an Adeptus Exemptus 70 = 4. This, of course, did not deter Crowley.
Most Golden Dawn initiates hoped to attain the Knowledge and Conversation of their Holy Guardian Angel, a mystical meeting with their Higher Self associated with the sephiroth Tiphareth and the grade Adeptus Minor 50 = 6.
This was reached through performing the difficult Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, a medieval ritual Mathers had come upon in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal and which he had translated into English. This work would have a profound influence on Crowley, and more than one biographer has suggested that his downfall began with his attempt to perform it. But even his Holy Guardian Angel was only a milestone on Crowley’s magical ascent. Everything we know about him tells us he was heading for the Abyss.
Crowley rose through the ranks very quickly. Most of what he was required to learn as a Neophyte he already knew. The next hurdles, of Zealator, Theoricus, and Practicus, were no trouble, and by May 1899 he had reached the rank of Philosophus. The next grade, Adeptus Minor 50 = 6, required a probationary period, and so Crowley had to cool his magical heels for a spell. By this time he had met the only member of the Golden Dawn for whom he retained any respect. After one ceremony he became aware of a powerful magical force, which seemed to emanate from a member he had yet to meet. Frater Iehi Aour (“Let There Be Light”), otherwise known as Allan Bennett, had a reputation as a magician second only to Mathers. He approached Crowley and to Crowley’s surprise said, “Little Brother, you have been meddling with the Goetia!” Bennett must have had a keen intuition. Goetia means “howling” but it is also the term used for magic that deals with dark, unenlightened forces. Crowley denied this. Bennett then said, “In that case the Goetia has been meddling with you.” (Crowley believed that Yeats was casting spells at him, because of his poetry, and probably felt Bennett’s remark confirmed this.)
Crowley had by this time decided to perform the Abramelin ritual. He had left his rooms at the Hotel Cecil and taken a flat at 67-69 Chancery Lane, a well-off street in the City of London. He had rented it under the name of Count Vladimir Svareff. Crowley says he took this alias for three reasons. One was that in order to perform the Abramelin magic properly, he had to cut himself off from his family. Another was his love for Russia. The other was as a sociological experiment. He knew how people reacted to a young man from Cambridge, but how would they react to a Russian nobleman? Crowley’s claim that he wanted to increase his knowledge of mankind has some merit, but it is difficult to believe that many people would really believe he was Russian. (He even issued another book of poetry, Jezebel, under that nom de plume; the reaction to it was much the same as to the earlier work by the gentleman from Cambridge.) Crowley’s explanation suggests an attempt to break out of his own limited perspective, but even as Count Svareff he was still Crowley pretending to be Russian. Mathers’s fantasy of being the Count of Glenstrae must have inspired him, and it is difficult not to see Count Svareff and the other alter egos Crowley adopted as another means of getting a response, and drawing attention to himself; Crowley always wanted his presence to be felt. George Cecil Jones, his tutor in magic, remarked that if he wanted solitude, he should have called himself Smith.
Abramelin the Mage’s magic—to give him his full title—cannot be performed just anywhere.15 Certain conditions must be met. It is unlike other magical rituals and is much more like an Eastern meditative text. The invocations are much more like prayers. For six months the aspirant must lead a holy and pure life and his mind must be focused on his sole objective. He must “inflame himself with prayer” and “invoke often.” As Israel Regardie writes, after finding a suitable place in which to perform the operation, one has little else to do except “aspire with increasing concentration and ardor . . . towards the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.”16 It is only after this that the traditional demons, talismans, and other regulation magical paraphernalia get involved.
A two-bedroom flat in London’s City may not have been the best location for this holy exercise, but Count Svareff was determined to try. Crowley decked out his flat with two “temples,” one for white magic, the other for black. He said he did this in order to maintain the magical equilibrium, that confusing balancing act between good and evil he had started in 1886. The white temple was lined with six large mirrors. This was in order to reflect the energies he invoked back at him. The black temple was empty except for an altar held up by an ebony statue of an African standing on his hands. (Black magic, like antinomianism, is keen on reversals.) Crowley also kept a skeleton in a cupboard that he fed with blood, small birds, and tea, aiming to return it to life. All he managed, though, was some slime covering the bones. The day after meeting Allan Bennett, Crowley went to the South London slum where Bennett was sharing a flat with another Golden Dawn member. Looking at the squalor, Crowley suggested that, in exchange for magical instruction, Bennett come and live with him. Not surprisingly, Frater Iehi Aour accepted. He must have been a good instructor. Soon after his arrival, life at Chancery Lane took a peculiar twist. All the conjurations, talismans, rituals, and other magical work started paying off. One night, returning from dinner with George Cecil Jones, Crowley found a rather large and mysterious magical cat in his stairwell. His white temple had been broken into, the altar was overturned, and the furnishings were scattered about. Crowley says that 316 demons ran about the place, which suggests either very small demons or a very large flat.
Bennett took a number of drugs to help with his asthma—opium, morphine, cocaine, and chloroform—and it was with Bennett that Crowley first began to experiment with drugs. Bennett had a biting contempt for the body, and his health, always frail, was worsening. He needed to get to a warmer climate. Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was the place, as there he could also enter the path of the bhikkhu, a Buddhist monk—Bennett was losing his interest in magic and was increasingly drawn to the Buddhist path. Crowley had inherited a fortune, but magical etiquette prevented him from simply paying Bennett’s fare. Crowley says he could not pay Bennett for his instructions, only give him room and board, yet why he couldn’t lend him the money is unclear. Crowley and Jones attempted to evoke the spirit of Buer, a demon of the Goetia, who deals with health, but were only partially successful. Then Crowley had an idea.
Initiation hadn’t dampened Crowley’s need for sex. He was having an affair with one initiate, Elaine Simpson (Soror Semper Fidelis—“Always Faithful”), and had proposed marriage to Susan Strong, an American opera singer he had met in Paris (she performed in one of Mathers’s Egyptian rites), but his proposal soon fizzled out. He was also enjoying himself with a “seductive siren” whose husband was a colonel in India; her name was Lilian Horniblow but she was known as Laura Grahame.17 Crowley says he struggled to overcome his passion for her, but he more likely simply tired of her and broke it off. After Buer made a partial appearance, his siren wrote to him again, begging him to come to her hotel. Crowley saw a connection. He visited Laura, and she begged him to come back to her. Crowley was noncommittal, but he offered her a chance to do something good for someone other than herself. He asked for a hundred pounds—a considerable sum then. He offered her no reason why, but said it wasn’t for him and that he had a private reason for not using his own money. His siren gave him the money, or possibly a ruby ring to sell—the accounts are unclear. He gave the cash to Bennett, and Frater Iehi Aour made ready for warmer climes.18
Crowley implies that Bennett’s benefactor later agreed to end their affair if he slept with her again—the inference is that he impregnated her (she asked for “a living memory of our love”) and she let him go to perform the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.19 The “gift” that saved Bennett’s life would come back to haunt Crowley. His siren later thought better of her generosity and asked that it be returned; it is unclear if it was a gift or a loan. Either way, Crowley had no intention of returning anything and vindicated himself with rationalizations. Crowley was later accused of stealing a hundred pounds. Charges were not brought against him—he did not actually steal the money—but the mud stuck and would turn up years later during the anti-Crowley tabloid campaign.
Crowley decided that Chancery Lane was no place to meet his Holy Guardian Angel. He needed somewhere more secluded for so serious an assignation. The fact that his flat was
under police observation because of suspected homosexual activity may have been a prompt—it was still illegal then—as may have been the rent, or perhaps he didn’t want to face the demons he had conjured without Frater Iehi Aour’s help.20 (After he left, the magical atmosphere, he said, remained tense and the landlord had difficulty renting the place.) In any case, he searched high and low and in August 1899 found what he was looking for. Boleskine was a long, low building on the southeast rise overlooking Loch Ness, halfway between Inverfarigaig and Foyers in Scotland; years later, Jimmy Page bought the place, and today it remains a site of thelemic pilgrimage.21 At the time Crowley moved in, the Loch Ness monster was yet to appear—the first sighting was in 1933—and one of the oddest explanations for Nessie’s existence (if she does exist) is that Crowley was somehow responsible. (I’m not sure if Crowley actually took credit for this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.) Boleskine seemed perfect for what he had in mind. The plan was to begin the ritual that coming Easter. He set up his home in November, bringing with him the magical mirrors of his white temple. He also started calling himself the Laird of Boleskine. From a Russian count he became a Scottish lord.