by Gary Lachman
Jane was a poet, and Crowley felt an immediate attraction to her. She was his “ideal incarnate,” “beautiful beyond my dearest dream”; Helen, an actress, also “glittered with the loveliness of lust.”11 Crowley later claimed that Jane Foster broke his heart and it was with her that he set his highest hopes on fathering a “magical son,” a goal that for a time he believed he had achieved.12 As with Mary D’Este, Crowley and Jane exchanged energies, and the next day, Jane told Crowley she was about to leave her husband—a much older man—and that they should lose no time in getting married. Crowley claims that even then he knew she was a fraud, but that he fought down this intuition out of love. Jane had to leave New York for a month. Crowley took this as a test. He thought the Secret Chiefs had sent both women to put him through an ordeal, although his love for his ideal didn’t prevent him from performing further opera with prostitutes. When she returned, they became lovers, but Jane tormented Crowley, saying that she detested the physical side of love; she may, however, have only detested receiving Crowley’s love by his preferred method per vas nefandum. When she left town again, Crowley was desperate, and to relieve his anguish he spent time with the Snake. She may have gotten more than she bargained for. One of Crowley’s more peculiar habits was bestowing what he called the Serpent’s Kiss. He had “unusually pointed canines” and he would take a bit of flesh between them and suddenly snap, leaving “two neat indentations.” Often he drew blood: the heiress Nancy Cunard claimed she got blood poisoning from one of Crowley’s love bites. Apparently the Snake was aroused by Crowley’s bite, and a twelve-hour orgy ensued, at the end of which Crowley woke into “pure love” and had a vision of a diamondlike cube.13
Crowley’s desire to have a son was sincere, but Jane was not the woman to bear him one. She had difficulty conceiving and had already suffered a stillbirth. Over the autumnal equinox of 1915, Sister Hilarion (Jane’s magical name) and Crowley carried out several magical opera aimed at fathering his heir, and Crowley was disappointed when they failed; predictably, he blamed her. In October Crowley joined Jane and her elderly husband on a tour of America; his passage was most likely covered by Jane’s cuckolded spouse. In Detroit Crowley visited the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical laboratories, where he topped up his supply of anhalonium. As in London, in New York Crowley was known for dosing people, and on one occasion he got the novelist Theodore Dreiser very stoned.14 In Chicago he met the Buddhist scholar Paul Carus, and in Vancouver, the O.T.O. member Charles Stansfeld Jones. Jones—or Frater Achad—was originally from London and had joined the A...A... in 1909, brought in by Captain Fuller. Jones later emigrated to British Columbia, where he set up an O.T.O. lodge that would play a large part in Crowley’s later fortunes.15
The group headed south to Seattle and San Francisco, then Los Angeles, where Crowley was dismayed at the “cinema crowd of cocaine-crazed, sexual lunatics, and the swarming maggots of near-occultists.”16 At Point Loma near San Diego he tried to meet Katherine Tingley, the head of the American section of the Theosophical Society. He wanted to propose an alliance, but his reputation preceded him and she declined a meeting. By the time the trio returned to New York, Jane had had her fill of love and will with the Great Beast and dumped him. For his part he had grasped the truth of her falseness and was compelled to “slay her.”17 This meant that he had to destroy the ideal of her he had created. His means of demolition was a prostitute, yet something important had come of the trip.
On October 12, 1915, his fortieth birthday, in a railway carriage heading back East, Crowley accepted that he had passed into the grade of Magus, the most exalted yet, as it is identified with the “word of the aeon.” In recognition of this he took the name To Mega Therion (Greek for the “Great Beast”). In the summer of 1916, while on a magical retirement in New Hampshire, he formally ratified his grade by crucifying a frog he had baptized as Jesus of Nazareth in a ritual that Francis King describes as “sheer black magic” and “thoroughly sadistic.”18 Crowley went through a mock trial where the unfortunate amphibian was charged with blasphemy and scourged. The frog as Jesus had “plagued and affronted” Crowley all his life and now the “slave god” was in the hands of the “Lord of Freedom.” He was not merciful. Once again Crowley was hitting back at his Plymouth Brethren upbringing, something a less retarded personality would have jettisoned long before. After nailing the beast to his handmade cross, Crowley put it out of its misery by stabbing it with his magick dagger. He then cooked and ate its legs and burned the rest to ashes.
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IN EARLY 1915, Crowley was on a bus heading up Fifth Avenue. He was reading an article about himself sent to him by a London press-cutting service, when a stranger sitting behind him asked if he was in favor of a “square deal” for Germany and Austria. America had yet to enter World War I and it was still uncertain if it would side with the Entente or the Central Powers. Ever alert to twists of fate and eager for new opportunities, Crowley said he was. The man—one “O’Brien,” although it’s possible he never existed—gave Crowley his card and suggested he call at his office. When Crowley arrived at the office of The Fatherland, O’Brien was not there, but he was surprised to discover George Sylvester Viereck, a German-American poet whom Crowley knew in London from the English Review. Crowley describes Viereck as capable of “awakening an instructive repulsion in most people”; nevertheless, Crowley liked him.19 He liked Viereck even more when he offered him a job. The Fatherland was a pro-German newspaper that aimed to muster American support for Germany against the British. There were many German immigrants in America and sympathies with Germany were high. Crowley’s job, in a nutshell, was to write pro-German, anti-British propaganda. Crowley accepted, and in order to clinch the offer, he even expressed strong pro-Irish sympathies; Ireland was about to rebel against English rule and would receive German help. He even claimed he was Irish himself. He wasn’t and he never set foot there, but naturally that didn’t matter.
From 1915 to 1917 Crowley wrote for The Fatherland as well as another journal Viereck published, The International. Much has been written about this questionable period in his career, not least of all by Crowley himself. Long sections of the Confessions are devoted to explaining it. Crowley justified his actions by saying that he quickly realized that The Fatherland—subtitled Fair Play for Germany and Austria-Hungary—was the center for German propaganda in America, and that Viereck, for all his sterling qualities, could not be the mastermind behind the operation, which also included espionage. Crowley maintains that he was a British patriot, and that the “undercover” work he was about to embark on was either tacitly condoned or explicitly organized by British Intelligence. The responsibility for the German operation, he felt, fell to Professor Hugo Münsterberg, a German psychology professor at Harvard University, with whom Crowley had, he claimed, crossed swords intellectually. Münsterberg, a friend of the philosopher and psychologist William James, was outspokenly pro-German in the lead-up to World War I and was, in fact, at one point suspected of being a spy. Most of Münsterberg’s work, however, was aimed at dismantling the stereotypes that Germans and Americans had about each other, in the interests of better relations between the two nations. Like many academics, he was concerned that war would hamper the progress of knowledge, which knows no national boundaries. Crowley communicated with Sir Guy Gaunt, head of Naval Intelligence, about his “plan,” but Gaunt had no interest in it, and regarded The Fatherland as relatively harmless and insignificant. Regarding Crowley’s ostensible “undercover” work, Gaunt summed it up as an expression of his “frantic desire for advertisement,” and estimated Crowley himself as a “small-time traitor.”20
Crowley says that he took the job in order to undermine the German propaganda effort by writing articles so absurd that no one would take them seriously. He also aimed to infiltrate the espionage network behind The Fatherland and bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. He knew, he said, that by doing so he would cut himself off from his friends and his sourc
e of income, and be forced to dishonor his name, which it was his destiny to make immortal.21 Yet he had done these things already. He was alone in New York. He had no money, and had spent years building up his image as a satanic rebel and self-serving cad; he had already lost close friends because of it. What did he really have to lose?
He would, he said, work Viereck up slowly, starting with “relatively reasonable attacks on England” and then produce “extravagances which achieved my object of revolting every comparatively sane human being on earth.”22 Some of Crowley’s Fatherland pieces are patently ridiculous. In one he compares the German Kaiser to an incarnation of Lohengrin, Siegfried, and Parsifal, German mythological heroes immortalized in Wagner’s operas, in absurdly hyperbolic prose. Some are funny. Writing of bombing raids over London carried out by German zeppelins, Crowley criticized their accuracy. His aunt’s house in Croydon, South London, was spared, and Crowley asked the bombers to try again, giving them her address. Yet others are not unlike the standard propaganda work being produced at the time and would have been accepted by The Fatherland readers, who were never very many, as reasonable. Nevertheless, others are indeed revolting. In one Crowley condones the execution of the British nurse Edith Cavell, who aided the wounded of both sides—“patriotism is not enough,” she famously said—and who helped two hundred Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium. She was arrested for this and found guilty of treason, and on October 12, 1915, Crowley’s birthday and the day he accepted the grade of Magus, she was executed. Crowley compares her to Judas Iscariot and Lucrezia Borgia while he ranks Moritz von Bissing, the Governor General of Belgium, who refused a stay of execution, with Jesus Christ.
Crowley had already produced quite a bit of work that revolted comparatively sane human beings, so doing so while getting paid at a time when he was broke was something of a heaven-sent. It was no new plan but much-needed business as usual. Crowley may well have convinced himself that he was working on England’s behalf when he accepted Viereck’s offer. His capacity for rationalization and romanticizing would have served him well here. He even speaks of his “duel” with Münsterberg in “romantic terms” as a battle between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty.23 But he was the only person to see it in this light. He wasn’t particularly pro-German. He was always and everywhere pro-Crowley, but getting paid to write bad press about the country that ignored him would have appealed to his sense of humor. Charles Richard Cammell, a friend of Crowley’s in his later years and one of his early biographers, suggested that Crowley’s pro-German work was motivated by his being snubbed by British Intelligence when he had offered his services to them. He was also, Cammell argued, appalled by the pro-British propaganda; it went to the silly extreme of attacking Santa Claus as a Teutonic myth. How writing for the Germans was a response to this is unclear, but Cammell hits the nail on the head, I think, when he says that Crowley believed that the Germans would see through his plan while the British and pro-British Americans would grasp it, too, and Crowley, making a quick escape from a dangerous situation, would return to England in a “blaze of glory.”24
That blaze of glory really mattered, not the British war effort. Crowley had the unfortunate habit of many obsessives: if they think something should be so, it quickly becomes so, at least in their minds. Yet Crowley’s plan backfired. Word of his activities got back to England, and in the spring of 1917, police raided the O.T.O. headquarters at 93 Regent Street, not far from his favorite haunt, the Café Royal. Some of his associates were also raided. A bookseller who had a copy of The Open Court, a magazine edited by Paul Carus and that published Crowley’s propaganda, spent three months in jail. When Crowley heard about this, he was stunned and declared that he would go to Washington to sort it out. Naturally he didn’t. In 1918 William Jackson, assistant to New York’s attorney general, questioned Crowley about his pro-German work. He admitted that he had no connection with the British Secret Service, and the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed that Crowley had provided no information about the Germans or anyone else during the war. Word of one of his more flamboyant stunts, however, reached the British authorities who, in the phrase attributed to Queen Victoria, but possibly apocryphal, were not amused.
In order to prove his Irish sympathies to his employer, just before dawn on July 3, 1915, Crowley, with Leila Waddell and four “other debauched persons on the verge of delirium,” took a motorboat to the Statue of Liberty.25 Here Crowley read a parody of the Declaration of Independence and then tore up an envelope that allegedly contained his British passport (it didn’t). Then Soror Agatha played “The Wearing of the Green.” Someone waved an Irish flag, and Crowley made a speech about life, liberty, and love in which he renounced his allegiance to England and dedicated his last drop of blood to liberating Ireland. He ended by proclaiming the Irish Republic before topping things off with an “Erin go Bragh.” The delirious crew then headed off to breakfast. The New York Times wrote a few lines about it. Word got back to the British Foreign Secretary, who was also told that Crowley was writing for an enemy publication. Word had also reached the British authorities that Crowley’s friend Frank Harris was also in New York and involved in similar activities; like Crowley, Harris was broke and needed the work. Crowley said he tried to contact the British Military Mission in Washington at around this time but was snubbed. If they had heard of this event, it isn’t surprising.
In New York Crowley made his way into the bohemian circles of Greenwich Village and began to think of himself as a painter. He rented a studio in Washington Square and took out a newspaper advertisement asking for “Dwarfs, Hunchbacks, Tattooed Women, Harrison Fisher Girls [named after a popular artist of the time], Freaks of All Sorts, Coloured Women, only if exceptionally ugly or deformed, to pose for artist.” We’ve seen that Crowley believed that “the supreme masters of the world seek ever the vilest and most horrible creatures for their concubines,” and his choice of models may have had something to do with this. It may also have had to do with the fact that no matter who his model was, Crowley’s paintings tended to deform his subject; whatever he began with, the end was more often than not freakish. Crowley attracted some attention to his work, and newspaper articles about him emphasized its outré character. A reporter for the Evening World spoke of his studio being covered with “the wildest maelstrom of untamed and unrelated colors ever confined under one roof,” and suggested that they look like “a collision between a Scandinavian sunset and a paint-as-you-please exhibit of the Independent Artists’ Association . . .” When asked what kind of painter he was, Crowley said he was an old master, because “I’m a painter of mostly dead souls.”26 He also assured the reporter that he never studied art nor ever intended to. By this time his ex-friend and brother-in-law Gerald Kelly was regularly exhibiting at London’s Royal Academy. One wonders if Crowley’s taking up the brush had anything to do with Kelly’s continued success.27
Yet, aside from prostitutes, Crowley’s choice of women remained somewhat conventional. It is rare that we find him with a freak or a vile or horrible creature. In April 1916 he met and seduced Alice Ethel Coomaraswamy, a singer and the very attractive wife of the art historian and follower of the philosophia perennis Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Seduced, however, may be too polite a term. Crowley did not think highly of Coomaraswamy; in his Magical Record he refers to him as a “bastard, thief, coward, and murderer.”28 The fact that Coomaraswamy was a Eurasian contributed to Crowley’s animus. In his Confessions Crowley remarks on his low regard for people of mixed European and Asian blood. He calls Coomaraswamy a “half-breed,” “eminent mongrel,” and “worm” and claims that he effectively gave his wife to him, in exchange for a sex partner of his own.29 Naturally Crowley complied. In the bargain, recognizing Ratan Devi’s (Alice’s stage name) singing talent, Crowley used all his powers to make her a success. He also made her pregnant; his Magical Record recounts their first union as “the most magnificent in all ways since I can remember,” and they carried on with several
opera after that.30
By this time Coomaraswamy, according to Crowley, hoping to palm off his wife, proposed divorce, to which Crowley agreed “with a yawn.” But after Ratan became a success—due, of course, to Crowley’s coaching—Coomaraswamy changed his mind; Crowley claims that financial considerations decided him. Although he loved her—as he had loved Jane, and Mary, and Rose, et cetera—Crowley did not care if Alice stayed with her husband or not, but the fact that she was pregnant with his child forced him to take action: the baby might be the magical son he so desired. Sadly, the fates, Secret Chiefs, or simply chance was against him. Alice decided to return to England, where she had other children, for her confinement; after the birth she would return. Crowley claims that the idea was Coomaraswamy’s; he knew Alice did not fare well traveling by sea—indeed she had been forced to break a previous sea voyage during an earlier pregnancy—and intended that this voyage would be disastrous. It was; she miscarried. Crowley claims that he was prepared to “make any sacrifice necessary to insure [Alice’s] welfare and that of our child,” but, in fact, he did nothing to prevent her leaving for England.31 He explains his nonchalance by saying that he “refused to put pressure on her,” but he would nevertheless serve her with “every ounce” of his strength. Yet if Alice and their child meant so much to him, one would think that a word of the aeon might make a bit more effort to secure their safety. When Alice “implored” him to take her back, he replied with “immovable firmness,” accusing her of killing their baby.