by Gary Lachman
Captain Fuller met the twenty-three-year-old poet Victor Neuburg at the funeral of William Stewart Ross, the editor of the Agnostic Journal, who died in November 1906. Neuburg had published some poetry in the journal and had read some of Crowley’s verse and he and Fuller became acquainted. Neuburg is little read today, and outside of Crowleyan circles he is best known for his hand in the publication of Dylan Thomas’s first book of poems. In the 1930s Neuburg edited a poetry section in a newspaper, The Sunday Referee, and his enthusiasm for Thomas’s verse led the newspaper’s editor to finance Thomas’s 18 Poems (1934). Neuburg died in 1940.
Fuller told Crowley about Neuburg. He, too, had come from a wealthy, repressive family, although his background was Jewish, not Christian, something Crowley never let him forget. Neuburg was reading languages at Crowley’s alma mater, Cambridge, and on an excursion to his old haunts, Crowley turned up unannounced at Neuburg’s rooms. He had read some of the younger poet’s verse and told him that it showed signs of promise. Neuburg also showed great magical potential, but equally appealing was Neuburg’s masochism and obvious need for a master. Neuburg was awkward, self-conscious, and unsure of himself, and his appearance matched his insecurities: unkempt, unwashed, ill mannered, thick lipped, curly haired, and possessed of a peculiarly piercing nervous laugh. Yet from most accounts Neuburg also had a curious faunlike appearance. Crowley was taller, accomplished, confident, flamboyant, and in search of a student. The two were made for each other, and along with developing a guru-chela relationship they also became lovers.
Neuburg’s association with Crowley soon led to trouble. Neuburg belonged to the university’s Pan Society—in 1910 he published a collection of poems entitled The Triumph of Pan—and Crowley often lectured to the group. When the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union discovered this, they complained; Crowley’s reputation preceded him. An anonymous letter accusing Crowley of pederasty reached Rev. R. St. J. Parry, dean of Trinity, who immediately barred Crowley from the college. (As Crowley was an ex-Trinity man, the Dean really could not do this.) A fellow student of Neuburg’s and member of the Pan Society, Norman Mudd, was outraged when the Dean ordered him to cancel all of Crowley’s future lectures, and he called on his fellow members to refuse. Crowley eventually confronted the Dean and asked why he had barred him from the college. The Dean had no problem with magic, he said, but Crowley’s sexual ideas were immoral. Parry finally threatened to expel anyone who had any dealings with Crowley. Mudd, who came from a poor background, was especially vulnerable, as the Dean could cancel his scholarship. Eventually he backed down and promised to avoid Crowley, a decision he regretted for the rest of his life. That he was forced to betray his role model gnawed at him for years to come.
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NEUBURG JOINED THE A...A..., taking the name Omnia Vincam (“I Shall Conquer All”), and started on his training. Along with extensive reading, this included eating hashish; Crowley believed it stimulated astral travel, a mystical knack for which Neuburg showed much potential. But Crowley also subjected Neuburg to a barrage of sadistic practical jokes, ostensibly to “liberate” him from his repressions and introduce him to “life,” but also to indulge Crowley’s own cruel sense of humor. At a party in Paris, Crowley got Neuburg drunk on Pernod and watched as the stumbling poet made embarrassing advances on women. Intuiting that Neuburg was a virgin, Crowley hatched a plan with one of his lovers, an artist’s model named Euphemia Lamb. Crowley told Neuburg that Euphemia was in love with him and before he knew it, they were engaged. Crowley then took Neuburg to a brothel, after which Crowley berated Neuburg for his infidelity and urged him to confess all to his betrothed, who was appropriately shocked and refused to see him. When Crowley eventually told Neuburg it was all a joke, he refused to believe it, and only accepted it when he found Euphemia naked on Crowley’s bed, enjoying a cigarette after sex. Crowley claims it was all for Neuburg’s benefit, but Crowley’s idea of what was good for someone invariably meant putting them in sexual situations he approved of. Crowley seemed intent on fashioning Neuburg after his own image, subjecting him to humiliations and encouraging him in sexual “freedom” Crowley style. Whether it did Neuburg any good is debatable.
Crowley’s contemporary Gurdjieff also subjected his pupils to unpleasant, often painful ordeals; but he never gives the impression that he enjoyed it. Madame Blavatsky, too, often made life hell for the people around her, but one doesn’t feel that she got pleasure from it. Crowley had a nasty streak that his position as a teacher allowed him to indulge, and it is instructive that he quickly backed away from people who resisted him. Yet Crowley was a master at self-justification. If questioned about his sadistic methods, he could easily reply, “But I am only doing it for his own good.”
Neuburg’s own good included a grueling hike through northern Spain at the height of summer, where his and Crowley’s eventual grubby appearance led to their being mistaken for bandits. It also required a magical retirement in Boleskine. This occult holiday was a mix of magical training and straight-out S&M. Neuburg practiced the occult discipline of “rising on the planes,” a form of Kabbalistic meditation. One imagines an astral body, transfers one’s consciousness to it, and then uses it to “rise” through the Tree of Life. Neuburg proved very good at it, early on encountering the angel Gabriel, who wore white and had green spots on his wings and a Maltese Cross on his head. He also met a Red Giant who dismembered him; he was powerless against him until Crowley taught him the sign of Horus (leaning forward and stretching out the arms) and the sign of Harpocrates (putting one’s left forefinger on the lips). Curiously, Neuburg reported nocturnal emissions during some of these adventures.22 Neuburg’s astral travels were essentially extensions of the kinds of experiences Yeats had when experimenting with the tattwa symbols, but they are also very similar to what Jung called “active imagination,” a method of conscious fantasy that connects the conscious and unconscious mind. For Jung, the beings and landscapes encountered in active imagination emerge from the archetypes of the collective unconscious; for Crowley and Neuburg, they are the denizens of the Kabbalistic “paths” between the sephiroth of the Tree of Life. Swedenborg practiced a similar discipline on his many journeys to heaven and hell, and Rudolf Steiner did much the same when he “read” what he called the Akashic Record. (In A Secret History of Consciousness, I suggest that we have a natural capacity for this in what is known as “hypnagogia,” the strange state of consciousness between sleeping and waking.23 Jung, Swedenborg, and Steiner were all good hypnagogists.) We may argue whether the inner spaces encountered in Jung’s or Neuburg’s experiences were “merely” psychological or true “objective” mental realms. Nevertheless, each explorer encounters a strange inner territory that also seems to have its own odd “objectivity.” Even non-occultists experience this. After taking mescaline, Aldous Huxley spoke about the mind’s “darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins,” remarking on the “complete autonomy” of our inner inhabitants.24
Neuburg’s training included some less magical aspects. Crowley made him sleep naked for ten days in the cold on a bed of gorse, a torment that Jean Overton Fuller, Neuburg’s biographer, believed led to the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. Neuburg kept a meticulous record of his work, and when Crowley discovered that Neuburg had been dallying with the Qlipoth—astral “shells” and “husks” known as spiritual “harlots”—he gave him thirty-two whacks with a gorse switch and drew blood, although why astral harlots should offend Crowley isn’t clear. Neuburg’s arms were soon covered in razor scars, the result of practicing the stern discipline of Liber Jogurum, which penalizes every use of the word I with a sharp slash. Crowley also beat Neuburg’s buttocks with stinging nettles and subjected him to verbal abuse, making anti-Semitic remarks and berating him for his Jewishness. Gorse and nettles were acceptable, but Neuburg drew the line at racial slurs. “My Guru is unnecessarily rude and brutal,” Neuburg wrote in his magical diary, “merely to amuse himself and pass the time aw
ay . . . It seems to me that unnecessary and brutal rudeness is a prerogative of a cad of the lowest type. It is the very limit of meanness to grouse at a man because of his race . . . It is ungenerous also to abuse one’s position as a Guru: it is like striking an inferior who will be ruined if he retaliates . . . ”25 Gurdjieff, too, could sling verbal abuse with the best. Fritz Peters recounts seeing him rage at A. R. Orage so badly that Orage, a large and accomplished man, emerged from Gurdjieff’s browbeating “withered and crumpled.”26 But Gurdjieff never sank to racial insult.
At Boleskine Neuburg met Rose who, he later told a friend, was drunk most of the time. Crowley estimated her minimal intake at a bottle of whiskey a day. He placed Lola Zaza in his mother-in-law’s care and told Rose she would not get her back until she dried out. Her doctor said the only hope was for her to enter a clinic. Rose refused, so Crowley asked for a divorce; he had no trouble providing the necessary evidence of infidelity. Oddly the two continued to live together for a time even after the divorce, but on November 24, 1909, their marriage was over. Two years later Rose was interred in an asylum for alcoholic dementia. When she was released some years later, she married her doctor; but her cure was temporary and she eventually died of liver failure in 1932. Gerald Kelly had long detested Crowley’s treatment of his sister and their parents, and Crowley himself was jealous of Kelly’s success; he soon became a royally appointed portrait painter and Crowley predictably chalked up Kelly’s rise to lack of talent and a taste for respectability. Although Crowley tried to maintain custody of his daughter, Lola Zaza eventually rejected him and also disappeared from his life.
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DURING NEUBURG’S ORDEAL in Boleskine, Crowley accidentally “found” the manuscript of The Book of the Law, mysteriously mislaid some years back. He took this as confirmation that a new current had started for him. One sign of this was the publication of Crowley’s occult magazine The Equinox: The Review of Scientific Illuminism. Between 1909 and 1913, ten bulky volumes emerged—at the spring and autumn equinoxes, hence the title—and there was nothing quite like them. The Equinox is generally considered Crowley’s magical legacy. The first issue appeared on March 21, 1909. A hodgepodge of magical instruction, poetry, essays, reviews, and mystical text the size of a telephone directory, most of The Equinox was written by Crowley under his own name or various pseudonyms; Neuburg and Captain Fuller contributed, too. Allan Bennett contributed, and Crowley drew in the occult artist and fin de siècle enfant terrible Austin Osman Spare. Spare joined the A...A... but had a falling-out with Crowley and did not stay long.27 Crowley also attracted some outside names, among others, the fantasist Lord Dunsany—a major influence on H. P. Lovecraft—and the literary “buccaneer” Frank Harris, remembered today as the author of the sexually explicit My Life and Loves (1931). Harris would remain a friend of Crowley’s for some years, the two sharing a knack for notoriety and living on their wits.
The Equinox was published out of the A...A... headquarters, a fifth-floor walkup at 124 Victoria Street, not far from Buckingham Palace. Here Crowley conducted magical drug parties featuring hashish but also anhalonium, a form of peyote whose most well-known derivative is mescaline; Crowley was engaging in something like Ken Kesey’s “Trips Festival” or Timothy Leary’s acid sessions some years in advance. Some biographers suggest Crowley introduced peyote’s effects to Europe (and perpetuate the myth that he turned Aldous Huxley on to it in Berlin in the 1920s; he didn’t) but the psychologist Havelock Ellis wrote about his mescaline experience in 1898, a decade earlier. (Ellis passed some on to Yeats, who, as mentioned, preferred hashish.28) Membership grew and soon Crowley could count the psychic investigator Everard Fielding, Naval Commander G. M. Marston, the poet Meredith Starr (Herbert Close), the well-to-do George Raffalovitch, and others as devotees. Crowley described a scene at his temple when “the god came to us in human form . . . and remained with us . . . for the best part of an hour, only vanishing when we were physically exhausted by the ecstasy of intimate contact with his divine person.”29 (Symonds suggests that this “intimate contact” was in some way sexual.)
On another occasion, after dancing around the altar, everyone was convinced they were being visited by something that “did not belong to the human species” and were terrified until someone switched on the light and “no stranger was to be seen.”30 One visitor to Crowley’s temple was the novelist Ethel Archer, who had published some poetry in The Equinox. After being admitted to a dimly lit, empty room, where people sat on cushions, she and her husband drank some beverage and then watched Neuburg dance while music played and Crowley recited poetry. She later attributed the “lively” feeling that lasted the week after the performance more to the beverage than to the ritual, and would fictionalize her experience in her novel The Hieroglyph (1932).31 Crowley’s temple also received some press. A reporter for the Daily Sketch attended a performance of one of Crowley’s rituals at the Silver Star HQ. After climbing the “interminable stairs” he was met by a brother robed in white and carrying a sword. He entered a dark room, lit only by a dim red light. Other men in white, red, or black robes were stationed around the room. Incense filled the air. After someone recited the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and the temple was purified with water, Crowley, robed in black, led a procession around the altar. A “Cup of Libation,” supposedly peyote and opium mixed with fruit juice, was passed around several times. The Greater Ritual of the Hexagram was performed, and Crowley read his poetry. Then Neuburg danced the “dance of Syrinx and Pan in honor of our lady Artemis.” Toward the end a new acolyte, the Australian Leila Waddell, played the violin, until Crowley declared the temple closed.32
The reporter had seen an early performance of Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis, a public ritual that gave Crowley the fame he had been seeking since his Cambridge years but which also inaugurated the infamy that would last the rest of his life.
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NEUBURG EDITED THE SECOND ISSUE of The Equinox, which appeared on September 21, practically single-handedly, and Brother V.V.V.V.V. decided that he and his chela deserved a holiday—technically speaking, a magical retirement. Crowley’s coffers were running low and it is unclear if he, or Neuburg, whose parents were well off, paid; Neuburg often gave Crowley his own money, and Jean Overton Fuller reports that at one point Crowley sent Neuburg’s parents a letter demanding £500 if they wanted to see their son again.33 With his divorce proceedings under way, Crowley and his student headed across the Mediterranean to North Africa. They arrived in Algiers on November 17 and from there took a tram to Arba, where they continued south on foot through the desert to Aumale. In a cheap hotel Crowley again heard what he thought was the voice of Aiwass. He broke out into a sweat. “Call me,” it said. Never one to hesitate, Crowley did.
Crowley had with him a magical notebook in which he had copied out the Enochian “keys” of Dr. John Dee, with which he had experimented while in Mexico. Enochian magic is a rarity within the Western occult tradition. Although the language taught to Dee by his scryer Edward Kelly—who received it from the angel Madimi—seems gibberish (“Madariatza das perifa Liil cabisa micalazoda . . .”), it also seems to have its own grammar and syntax, which suggests that it is not mere nonsense. Dee and Kelly received nineteen “keys,” and the nineteenth allows the magician access to thirty “aires” or “aethyrs,” what we would call altered states of consciousness. While in Mexico Crowley had begun his exploration of these “aethyrs” backward, in keeping with Enochian tradition (Kelly had received the Enochian alphabet in this way), starting with the thirtieth and twenty-ninth. His lack of appropriate initiation prevented him from continuing, but now that he had advanced magically, he intended to investigate the rest. He tells us he had no idea that he had packed this particular notebook, but as with the missing manuscript of The Book of the Law, this may have been a case of “accidentally on purpose.”34 The result of Crowley and Neuburg’s Enochian adventures was recounted in a text Crowley called The Vision and the Voice, which subseque
ntly appeared in The Equinox and which he ranked second only to The Book of the Law in importance; much of the doctrine and pantheon of thelema emerged from these visions. It is a sometimes-disturbing account of strange visions, angels, demons, cosmic cubes, Qlipoth, weird landscapes, magical watchtowers, and mystical initiations in the City of the Pyramids under the Night of Pan, and it is Crowley’s attempt to advance himself as a mystic seer. How successful he was is debatable, but it was after this ordeal that Crowley formally accepted the rank of Magister of the Temple, which placed him in the company of the Secret Chiefs.35
The idea was to walk out into the desert and, at appropriate spots, “call” the voice that Crowley had heard in the hovel in Aumale, using the Enochian “key” and entering the different “aethyrs.”36 They averaged about one a day. Crowley and Neuburg made an unusual pair as they tramped under the African sun. Crowley’s athletic frame was turning stout and his head was shaved. He was thirty-four, robed in black, a pistol stuck into his sash, and he carried a large vermilion Calvary Cross made of six squares with a huge golden topaz set in the middle. The topaz served as Crowley’s “shew stone,” the equivalent of the crystal ball used by Dee and Kelly. Crowley would intone the “key,” peer into the topaz, and the visions would come. Neuburg’s head was also shaved, except for two tufts on either side, dyed red and twisted to look like horns. He was not so much Crowley’s student at this point, but something more like his demonic “familiar.” At twenty-six, thin, his spine slightly curved and his lips bulging, Neuburg seemed to fit the part, and one wonders what the locals made of them. In contrast to Dee and Kelly, Crowley himself acted as scryer and Neuburg as scribe, a reversal of roles suggested by Crowley’s belief that he was Kelly in a previous life. The association is apt; Kelly, too, had a very bad reputation, and at one point convinced the often malleable Dee that the angels required them to swap wives.37