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

by Gary Lachman

  Eckenstein’s advice must have worked. The two headed to Amecameca, a town at the base of both mountains, and spent three weeks at a camp 14,000 feet up Iztaccíhautl, eating canned food, drinking champagne, and breaking world records, at least according to Crowley. A comical incident occurred when, on returning to civilization, they were told of the death of Queen Victoria, who had ruled Britannia for sixty-three years. Expecting the Englishmen to be heartbroken, their host was surprised to see Crowley toss his hat into the air and jump for joy. At Colima they attempted to climb the active volcano but backed down when the soles of their boots began to burn. At Popocatépetl they brought along a journalist who had written disparagingly about their climbing ability. Tying him between themselves, they raced to the summit at top speed—Crowley and Eckenstein had already broken the record for uphill pace at great height. Eckenstein went ahead and pulled as Crowley brought up the rear, prodding his breathless companion with his axe. After this Crowley said that they had “achieved all our real objects” but more likely they were simply tired of climbing and a more pressing matter dominated Crowley’s mind: the question of Mathers’s authority and his link to the Secret Chiefs, something, he believed, that Bennett could answer. He and Eckenstein agreed to meet soon to plan an expedition to the Himalayas, where they would tackle Chogo Ri, K2, the second-highest mountain in the world. But for the time being they separated, Eckenstein heading for England and Crowley traveling north to San Francisco, en route to visit Bennett in Ceylon.

  In El Paso, Texas, Crowley watched a man have his eyes gouged out over a card game. In San Francisco, he stayed in Chinatown. He liked the Chinese and instantly recognized their superiority to Anglo-Saxons, but San Francisco itself, a “madhouse of frenzied money-making and frenzied pleasure-seeking,” didn’t appeal.8 Early May found Crowley on board the Nippon Maru bound for Honolulu. He headed to Waikiki, where he fell in love with an older American woman who was traveling with her adolescent son.9 Her name was Mary Beaton but Crowley discreetly calls her Alice. Like his Mexican prostitute with evil inscrutable eyes, Mary inspired Crowley and the result was Alice: An Adultery, a sonnet sequence, in which Crowley describes their amorous acts. These included sex en route to Japan while Alice’s son was in the same cabin. On the Nippon Maru they reached the Land of the Rising Sun and parted. Crowley’s sonnet sequence immortalized their doomed love—she regretfully had to return to her husband—but Crowley seems never to have considered that Alice simply wanted a holiday fling with a younger man. Crowley insults her for luring him away from his single-minded quest and teaching him what women were worth, forgetting that he had already been deflected from his fate several times by his own doing.

  Crowley didn’t like Japan or the Japanese, comparing them to the English—they were, after all, two island nations—but ironically, given his later behavior among “natives,” resenting their racial arrogance. This criticism may have been prompted by his being turned away from a monastery near the Kamakura Daitbutsu, one of the huge statues of the Buddha that dot the island. His destiny lay elsewhere, indeed, but the monks may have recognized trouble. The fact that Crowley considered taking vows when he had already traveled across the Pacific en route to seek Bennett’s advice about an all-important question suggests that, once again, Crowley really had no idea what to do with himself. But he gave his wandering some rationale, saying that he was sent here or there by order of the Secret Chiefs, much as Madame Blavatsky had mythologized her earlier journeys, saying they were ordained by her Hidden Masters.

  In Hong Kong Frater Perdurabo met with Soror Semper Fidelis hoping to receive some magical solace. Since relocating she had turned her fidelity to her husband—she was now Elaine Witkowski—and her magical days were behind her. Crowley was shocked to hear that she had worn her magical robes at a costume ball given by British expats and had won first prize. Disgusted with Elaine’s heresy as well as her reluctance to renew their intimacy, Crowley wandered to Ceylon, which he reached on August 6. In Colombo he found Frater Iehi Aour tutoring the sons of Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan, the solicitor general of Ceylon, who later became the Shaivite guru Sri Parananda. Ramanathan was also the cousin of the art historian and Traditionalist philosopher Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, whose wife would later have an affair with Crowley. Although Crowley found Ramanathan charming and cultivated—he had written a commentary on Saint Matthew that argues that Jesus was a yogi—he had no love of Hinduism and felt that Bennett could do better. But the real reason for his visit, the all-important question, remained.

  And it remained unasked: we never know exactly what Crowley wanted to know. But, at least according to Crowley, it did not remain unanswered. We do know that Crowley’s question revolved around an incident in which Bennett and Mathers argued about the Hindu god Shiva. It is said that if Shiva’s name is repeated often enough, he will open his eye and destroy the universe. Crowley suggests that Mathers took this personally, and that when Bennett began the mantra “Shiva, Shiva, Shiva,” Mathers threatened him with a pistol. Bennett, oblivious to all save his mantra, continued, and Mathers put the pistol to Bennett’s head. One account has Moina Mathers entering the room and saving Bennett’s life; another has Mathers finally cowed by Bennett’s greater faith. It is unclear what this strange but typical tale has to do with Crowley’s magical distress, except that his remark—“Mathers thus disposed of, to business!”—suggests that it somehow cleared the way for his further magical advancement.

  Bennett’s health was suffering and Crowley convinced him to relocate to the more beneficial climes of Kandy. There Crowley rented a bungalow overlooking a lake and for six weeks he again undertook instruction from Bennett, this time in yoga and meditation. Practically everything Crowley knew about yoga came from this time with Bennett. Yoga formed a large part of Crowley’s magical teaching. It makes up a good portion of his first magical handbook, Book Four, and his ideas about “higher consciousness” are usually couched in Buddhist or Hindu terms. One of his best works is the Eight Lectures on Yoga, a series he gave in London in 1937 and which was published many years later. Crowley’s approach is simple, clear, and unencumbered by jargon. “I propose to invoke the most remote and elusive of all Gods,” he told his audience, “the light of common sense.” “Yoga,” he tells us, “is first of all the union of the subject and the object of consciousness: of the seer with the thing seen.”10 As with his magical apprenticeship, Crowley took to his lessons avidly and within a few weeks had reached this union, known as Dhyana. Crowley’s aim in pursuing yoga was not the same as Bennett’s. He did not seek withdrawal from the world but the ability to “produce genius at will”—part of what Crowley called “Scientific Illuminism”—genius being in this sense the liberation of consciousness from mundane cares and a broadening and expansion of its power, an idea he discovered in William James’s classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. He recognized that in this sense yoga and magic have a common aim, the attainment of Samadhi, the highest level of Dhyana, being practically identical with the magical “assumption of the god form.”

  After a time the two realized they had to part. Bennett had decided to take the last step in becoming a monk; Crowley went big-game hunting in India. The idea was to eventually meet up with Eckenstein for their ascent of Chogo Ri. Once more Abramelin had faded into the background in the face of Crowley’s wanderlust. At one point Crowley again tried his hand at entering a monastery, and this time he had better luck than in Japan. Outside the great temple at Madura, Crowley sat in a loincloth with a begging bowl in hand. His hero Robert Burton had entered Mecca disguised as a Muslim, and Crowley wanted to follow suit. The natives saw through his disguise—Crowley was about as good a faux Hindu as he was a fake Russian—but his sincerity was evident and they allowed him into a secret shrine where he sacrificed a goat to Bhavani, the fearsome destructive face of the goddess Parvarti. When a desire to see Bennett once more took hold, Crowley decided to make the dangerous journey across the Arakan hills to the monastery in so
uth Burma where Bennett was living. En route with a companion in a dugout canoe on the Irrawaddy, Crowley came down with fever and hallucinated that the jungle was speaking to him and that he could feel the elemental spirits of nature. He then passed the time blasting away at everything he could with his rifle. One duck persisted in avoiding his barrage and so infuriated the master of Dhyana that he went ashore after it. The duck finally made the fatal mistake of flying overhead and Crowley potted it. Regardie surmises that for all his yogic training, a “fundamental hostility” remained in Crowley, as was evident in this rampant killing.11

  On February 14, 1902, Crowley reached Akyab, where he found Bennett in the monastery of Lamma Sayadaw Kyoung. Bennett was tall and stood out amid the shorter Burmese. But he was Frater Iehi Aour no longer. Bennett had joined the sangha, the community of monks, and was now the Bhikkhu Ananda Metteya, “Bliss of Loving Kindness.”12 Magic was behind him, as was much else. Crowley tells the story of how Bennett, coming across a poisonous snake in the road, preached the four noble truths to it and exhorted it to banish its anger.13 The snake bit his umbrella and then passed on. Bennett had become something of a guru and many visitors came to see the European bhikkhu, or monk. While they were together, Bennett and Crowley discussed plans for the spread of Buddhism to the West, but Crowley was often on his own and found time to work on his poem “Ahab” and to study Hindustani in preparation for K2. He also took to smoking opium, which he had already experimented with back in Chancery Lane. Crowley tells how, after several days in which the food and water brought to Bennett’s hut remained untouched, concerned monks came to him, worried about the white bhikkhu. Crowley went to investigate and found his guru levitating, his motionless body rocking gently in the breeze.

  On March 23, Crowley met Eckenstein in Delhi. Two days earlier he had written “Berashith,” an “Essay in Ontology,” his first attempt at metaphysics of magic. Berashith is a Hebrew word meaning “in the beginning.” It is the first word of Genesis and according to Kabbalah contains the secret of existence. Crowley claims to have “re-discovered the long lost and central Arcanum” of the “divine philosophers.”14 Although filled with Buddhist ideas, Crowley’s movement away from Buddhism is clear. He rejects Buddha’s silence regarding the question of how existence began and asserts the “absoluteness of the Qabalistic Zero.” Crowley uses arcane mathematics to arrive at an idea of a positive nothingness about which we can nevertheless make no concrete statement.15 Before creation this positive nothingness neither existed nor didn’t exist—“the idea of existence was just as much unformulated as that of toasted cheese,” one of Crowley’s more memorable insights—but it was out of this pregnant Nothing that the universe emerged. Crowley’s remark that “There is not and could not be any cause” sits well with contemporary ideas about cosmogony, as voiced by Stephen Hawking; in The Grand Design (2010), Hawking declared that “spontaneous creation” was all that was necessary to get things going, the universe beginning in a “quantum fluctuation in a pre-existing vacuum,” having no need of a creator. Crowley here is trying to grasp the ungraspable, the realm of being beyond the Supernals. His argument may not convince us, but the gist is clear. He is making his way to the Abyss.

  But before he reached those depths he would scale some heights. At 28,251 feet, K2 towers less than a thousand feet below Mount Everest. Crowley would no doubt have preferred to attempt Everest, but at that time it was off-limits to Europeans. K2, however, is a more dangerous climb and has acquired the nickname of the “Savage Mountain”; this element of risk must have piqued Crowley’s interest. It was first surveyed in 1856 and is known as K2 because it is the second peak of the Karakorum Range; Chogo Ri is a kind of nickname and simply means “big mountain.” Crowley and Eckenstein’s expedition was the first to attempt this titan, and it was not until 1954 that its summit was reached. Although ultimately unsuccessful—they got as far as 21,407 feet before turning back—Crowley and Eckenstein did set some records, including the longest time spent at such altitude (sixty-eight days). Given the treacherous conditions and the lack of modern gear—they had, for example, no oxygen tanks—that the expedition got as far as it did is remarkable, and Crowley rightly felt proud of this climb.

  Eckenstein was the expedition’s leader and he had gathered a few other climbers. In Delhi Crowley met up with Guy Knowles, a young Cambridge man with no climbing experience; J. Jacot Guillarmod, a Swiss doctor and mountaineer; and two Austrian rock climbers, Heinrich Pfannl and Victor Wessely. Typically, Crowley has nothing good to say about any of them; Crowley was second in command and everyone had to sign an agreement pledging total obedience to Eckenstein. Crowley countermanded this obedience just before the true climb began, when he refused to jettison the bundle of poetry books he had brought with him. Eckenstein argued they would weigh him down but Crowley could not abandon Milton, so Eckenstein gave way. Although Crowley claimed that he paid the bulk of the expedition’s expenses, Symonds reports that Knowles rejected this and claimed that Crowley didn’t spend a cent.16 That Crowley had ill will toward his companions did not bode well for the trek, and things got off to a bad start when Eckenstein was detained for three weeks by the authorities at Rawalpindi. No clear reason was given but most likely he was suspected of being a German spy.

  This, however, was the least of their worries. Crowley did not get on well with the natives, and some of the “racial arrogance” he criticized in the Japanese appeared when he felt obliged to beat the leader of their drivers with his belt. Crowley claimed this was necessary in order to win the coolies’ respect. “The first business of any traveler in any part of the world is to establish his moral superiority,” he tells us.17 Crowley’s moral superiority soon became a matter of concern and reappeared in a later climb. Dr. Guillarmod, who Crowley claimed “knew as little of mountains as he did of medicine,” had a different approach and set up a temporary clinic wherever they stopped, doing whatever he could to help people who rarely, if ever, saw a doctor.18 Although Eckenstein was at least half German, Crowley referred to Guillarmod, Pfannl, and Wessely as “undesirable aliens,” and would have preferred to have more Englishmen about.

  They started out optimistically but soon the odds seemed against them. The weather wasn’t promising, the terrain was grueling, and the sheer size of the Savage Mountain overwhelmed. Crowley had a flare-up of malaria and suffered from snow-blindness. His remedy for this, and for the exhaustion that overcame him, was to drink champagne. His fever was so bad that he hallucinated butterflies in the snow and he became paranoid about Knowles and threatened him with a pistol. Knowles didn’t trust Crowley and quickly disarmed him, keeping the pistol as a memento, a humiliation Crowley didn’t report in his Confessions. At one point Pfannl went mad (a condition he felt only Crowley could understand) and Wessely, who Crowley paints as a glutton, stole the food supplies; a court-martial was planned. On July 10 the party reached its highest point, but the weather had broken and promised to remain bad. The days for climbing farther were lost; even remaining where they were was exhausting. The Savage Mountain had beaten them; by August they were retreating down the glacier. It was Crowley’s first major defeat. Had he been successful, he would have been “the man who climbed K2” and the world would have known about it. He would have been established—and in many ways it is a shame the attempt was unsuccessful. We’ve seen that Crowley was at peace with himself only on the mountains. He devotes a large section of the Confessions to the expedition and it is clear that it meant a great deal to him. But now he was once again a wanderer of the wastes, and he had to press on.

  Crowley left Bombay en route to Paris in October 1902. He had spent the weeks after K2 shooting, traveling, and sightseeing. He stopped off at Cairo but avoided the pyramids, preferring instead the sophisticated entertainments at Shepheard’s Hotel, an Egyptian watering hole established in 1841 whose famous visitors included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Noel Coward. Today Crowley is mentioned among its illustrious guests.19 In Paris he
stayed with his friend the painter Gerald Kelly. While Crowley had been traveling around the world, Kelly was establishing himself as an important artist. The two had been corresponding and Crowley, never one to flinch at asking favors, invited himself to visit. He of course wanted to touch base with his fellow Cambridge man, but the real reason for the visit was the serious business with Mathers. Bennett had answered his question and the way forward was open.

  Crowley hoped to impress Mathers with his travels, his adventures, his knowledge of yoga, and his magical development. He wanted to be greeted as an equal, much as he wanted Yeats to greet him four years earlier. But when they met in Montmartre, where Mathers was living, his old master was singularly uninterested. In a letter to Kelly, Crowley anticipated this meeting as his Hour of Triumph, but the reunion was anticlimactic. Men such as Crowley and Mathers could not meet as equals and the tension was building. Crowley began his attack by inferring that Mathers had pawned an expensive dressing case and bag he had asked him to store while he was away. Mathers was as poor as ever and most likely did pawn them; this ignominious act lowered Mathers in Crowley’s eyes. Mathers had been in contact with the Secret Chiefs; of that Crowley had no doubt. But something had happened and he had fallen. Ironically, Crowley suggests Mathers’s fall came about through rashly invoking the forces of the Abramelin magic, something, as mentioned, often said about Crowley himself.20 Evidence for Mathers’s descent came in the form of a certain Mrs. M, who, according to Crowley, turned out to be a vampire, sent by Mathers to seduce his ex-pupil. In the Confessions Crowley quotes the account given by his first biographer and advocate, J.F.C. Fuller, who we will meet further on.21 Kelly is supposed to have asked Crowley to help free a certain Miss Q from the designs of a Mrs. M. Mrs. M, Kelly told Crowley, was a vampire and sculptor who was making a sphinx with the intention of giving it life; Miss Q was her victim. Crowley contrived a meeting and, alone with Mrs. M, saw her, “a middle aged woman worn with strange lusts” (exactly the kind of look designed to appeal to Crowley) transform into a “young woman of bewitching beauty.” The lustful Mrs. M now made advances on Crowley. Crowley knew that his life was at stake, so he began a “magical conversation,” which sent her evil energies back at her. After a struggle of wills, Mrs. M was transformed once again, this time into a hag of sixty, and Crowley left. Something suggested that Mrs. M could not be working alone and he was determined to discover her superiors. He then consulted a psychic who had a vision of Mathers’s home in Montmartre. There were Mathers and Moina, but it was Crowley’s shock to discover that their bodies had been taken over by the evil Mr. and Mrs. Horos! No wonder Mathers hadn’t been impressed with Crowley’s development: he was in the thrall of that evil couple.