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

by Gary Lachman

  This, however, was not the case with other visitors. Ninette’s sister Mimi, her twin, was inclined to join in the activities (only her prudish upbringing prevented her) but her elder sister, Helen, was appalled and complained to the British Consul in Palermo about alleged illegal goings-on. The police investigated but found nothing incriminating. Two writers Crowley had met in Paris, Mary Butts and Cecil Maitland, also disapproved of what they tasted of thelema. Mary Butts was a friend of Nina Hamnett’s. She was a novelist of merit and had a serious interest in the occult. She claimed that she went to Cefalù because she was interested in reaching the Fourth Dimension, an objective inspired by her reading Ouspensky.30 She found life at the abbey hard; there was little food, privacy, or free time, and the idea that her diary was open to all comers repelled her. The absence of toilets was also a drawback. At first she believed “the Beast to be a technical expert of the highest order,” and like Crowley she and her lover Maitland used hashish to facilitate astral travel; at the abbey they also added heroin to their intake. But soon she found the abbey a “sham” and Crowley a “fanatic.”31 That Crowley used children in his sexual rituals—to what extent is unclear—disturbed her, and it may have been this that appalled Ninette’s sister Helen.

  Crowley did not care for Mary. That she suggested how to transform the abbey into a “miniature university” put him off—women, we recall, were not supposed to have ideas—but the real problem was Maitland.32 Crowley perpetually sought a reliable successor—or at least magical heir—and had so far struck out. Maitland seemed a likely candidate. Like Neuburg, Maitland was talented and brilliant but, as Crowley noted, he lacked real will, and Crowley no doubt believed Butts was responsible for this. On their arrival in late June 1921, Maitland and Crowley went for a swim, and Crowley did his best to drown his guest. Maitland escaped onto some sharp rocks, cutting himself badly in the process. Crowley may have been testing his capacity for domination à la Neuberg. The next day Maitland played a prominent role in the ceremony of the Cakes of Light, the recipe for which can be found in The Book of the Law. Maitland baptized a cock, christening it Peter Paul, while Leah, recapping Salome’s dance, demanded the bird’s head on a platter. The decapitated fowl’s blood was added to the ingredients.33 Meal is said to be the cakes’ main ingredient, but in Crowley’s Mass “the host is of excrement,” which the participants consume in adoration.34 Mary Butts found the offering unacceptable and remarked that on her arrival at the abbey, Crowley offered her “a goat’s turd on a plate.”35 Mary had a sense of humor equal to Crowley’s. During a ritual in which a goat was intended to copulate with Alostrael, the reluctant animal demurred, but was sacrificed anyway, its blood splattering the Scarlet Woman’s back. Leah, confused (and most likely drugged), asked Mary, “What should I do now?” and Mary replied, “I’d have a bath if I were you.”36 It seems this episode finally put Mary off Crowley.

  Mary wrote while at the abbey, and in Diary of a Drug Fiend Crowley depicts her as “a fat, bold, red-headed slut” and “white maggot” whose writing was “the most deplorable dreary drivel that had ever been printed.”37 He no doubt enjoyed that alliterative assault but it would rebound on him disastrously. Mary and Cecil left the abbey in September in ill health, bringing with them a heroin habit. Crowley, however, was not through with them. The following year, Leah visited the two in Paris. She said that if they didn’t give Crowley money, they would come to harm. Maitland handed her a hundred francs but evidently this was insufficient, and Leah cursed them. Two days later he took an overdose of Veronal, by accident or design or magick is unknown.38

  Yet all this should not have troubled the Beast. By 1921 he had reached the apex of his magical career. He was appalled by the enormity of the decision and feared it would require some “insane act to prove his power to act without attachment.” What was left to do in this department is unclear; Crowley had been acting without attachment for some time now. He gathered his forces and faced his last challenge as an impossibilist. Crowley had reached the top of the Tree of Life. He was ready to become an Ipsissimus, 100 = 1, entering Kether, the first sephiroth emerging from the positive nothingness of the Ain Soph Aur. What this was to free him from is, again, unclear. He was already beyond good and evil, right and wrong, and other such dualities and had achieved an unruffled indifference to everything around him. No matter. He would invoke Insanity itself—even though he had already invoked it more than once. At 9:34 in the evening, Crowley became a god. “As a God goes, I go,” he noted.39 Although Crowley swore to keep silent about this unthinkable achievement, the Scarlet Woman, of course, was not so bound.

  Reflecting on his attainment, Crowley noted that he had exposed himself to the full gamut of experience, to disease, accident, violence, to dirty and disgusting debauches, to eating excrement and human flesh—which seems to add substance to the claims that he, at some point, cannibalized someone.40 But this amounted, he said, to a morality the severity of which surpassed any other because it was absolutely free from any code of conduct.41

  One thing the Ipsissimus found it difficult to be unattached to was heroin. He started taking it on his return to England in 1919, first for his asthma, then for pleasure, and then because if he didn’t, he suffered withdrawal; he suffered similarly from cocaine. He was also very short of cash. In early 1922, after a visit to Paris with Leah—it was then that she hit up Mary and Cecil—Crowley retreated to a hotel in Fontainebleau and tried to kick the habit. He went there to beat the “storm fiend,” but also to get away from Leah; a distance was growing between them. He had been taking three grains of heroin a day, sometimes four or five, not to mention other drugs, and his health suffered. He still believed he could free himself of the addiction, but confessed that he had “erred in going too far” and that the “worship has become forced.” To admit that Aiwass’s command to take strange drugs had been precipitate would undermine his whole life, but Crowley realized he needed help. He met with a Dr. Edmund Gros, who suggested Luminal and a sanitarium, but Crowley insisted on administering his own treatment; anything else would have been admitting defeat. His notebooks from this time are filled with the frequency, amount, and effects of the heroin he was taking, as well as the horrors of trying to avoid it, with much wishful thinking about how he could beat it; Crowley’s chronicle of his addiction may be his most lasting literary contribution. Crowley uncovered the dodges he worked to get past the guards at the gates of indulgence, but life without heroin was hell. He needed it to get up and he needed it to get to sleep. He needed it, period.

  Another meeting with Leah in Paris proved depressing. He loved her, but that love was a curse. She, too, was addicted and she was exhausted from the rigors of her office. But perhaps with another Scarlet Woman . . . ? Back in Fontainebleau he asked Aiwass for direction. A young man, Augustine Booth-Clibborn, arrived at his door. He was interested in magick and Crowley expounded thelema to him exhaustively. Booth-Clibborn, Crowley explained, was to extract substantial sums from his parents, then head to Cefalù, where he would be initiated into his new life.42 But when Crowley drew up his pledge, Booth-Clibborn, alarmed at Crowley’s repeated requests for money, declined. Crowley cursed Booth-Clibborn.

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  CROWLEY AND LEAH DECIDED to go to London. Both of them needed a break from the Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum, and Crowley thought he could drum up some much-needed money there. But Crowley, who had been wearing his magical robes most days at the abbey, realized he hadn’t a thing for the trip. In Paris he reclaimed some clothes he had left at a cleaners in 1914—it was magical they were still there—and dressed in Highland gear (it was all he had), with his face painted and no more than £10 to his name, the Ipsissimus and his consort made their way to cross the Channel.

  Near Boulogne he was mistaken for Gerard Lee Bevan, a financier wanted for embezzlement. The police removed his glengarry cap and black frizzy wig and believed they had caught their man. Crowley took it as a joke. He was a famous poet and explorer and to prove
it, he produced a photograph of himself in J. Jacot Guillarmod’s book on the Chogo Ri expedition—one time Crowley was thankful for the odious Swiss. In England he tried to retrieve copies of his books held by the Chiswick Press, who claimed he owed a considerable sum in storage fees. The new owners were not sympathetic—Crowley claimed he had paid his bill—and Crowley had to cut his substantial losses. He tried to meet Captain Fuller at the War Office but his old champion avoided him. He met with Gerald Kelly, hoping for a handout but also to discuss his daughter Lola Zaza, who, Kelly informed him, was turning out like her father. They did not, it appears, discuss Rose. The apple does not fall far from the tree and Crowley was glad to hear that at fifteen, Lola was unmanageable, ill tempered, and conceited. She, however, was not glad to see her father.

  The only paying work Crowley had ever performed—aside from training in thelema—was writing and he approached his friend Austin Harrison at the English Review. Harrison commissioned some articles, which Crowley wrote under pseudonyms; Harrison could not publish them otherwise. In “The Great Drug Delusion” and “The Drug Panic,” Crowley argued that drug addiction was a myth; he even presented himself as a “New York specialist,” whose private clinic successfully treated patients through “moral reconstruction.” Crowley’s ideology, it seems, was getting the better of reality.

  Crowley fell out with Harrison but his expertise with drugs would come in handy. The novelist J. D. Beresford, an editor for the publisher William Collins, liked Crowley’s proposal for a sensational novel about drugs. There was a readership for books about the white slave trade; drugs and sex went well together, and Crowley could easily meet this requirement. Ostensibly the book would warn readers to avoid drugs, but it would also be a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which Crowley’s fictional alter ego would cure addicts through magick. He could also extoll the virtues of the abbey and encourage readers to travel there. With an advance of £60—modest but sizable for the impecunious Ipsissimus—Crowley set to work. It was his first book that was not self-published.

  On June 4, 1922, in his room in the Kabbalistically significant No. 31 Wellington Square, off the King’s Road in Chelsea, with Leah as scribe, Crowley started dictating The Diary of a Drug Fiend. He finished on July 1. For less than a month’s work it is an impressive achievement. Crowley dictated about five thousand words daily; as a working writer I can confirm this is a hefty quota. Leah wrote in longhand and was shattered by the end. She coughed blood and feared she had tuberculosis; after taking down Crowley’s 120,000 words, she immediately left for Cefalù. Their own addiction was going strong; the two consumed substantially as they produced a fairy tale about how drugs were ultimately harmless. The Diary of a Drug Fiend is not a good novel. It rambles considerably, Crowley’s characters are cardboard—it is an unabashed roman à clef—his alliteration gets the better of him, and he is too easily drawn into satirizing his enemies. But what it lacks in literary finesse it makes up for in imagination and dash; his account of the hell of addiction and his descriptions of the Abbey in Telepylus (Cefalù) are, as mentioned, often striking. In 1972 John Symonds annotated a paperback edition identifying all the characters. Peter Pendragon, the protagonist who becomes addicted and comes to the abbey to be cured, is based on Cecil Maitland. We’ve already mentioned Mary Butts’s depiction. But the most revealing characterization is of Crowley himself. He appears as King Lamus, otherwise known as the “Big Lion” (Great Beast). In Homer’s Odyssey King Lamus is the ruler of the Laestrygonians, a race of cannibal giants. Lamus is, to put it bluntly, a superman. Those unable to recognize him as a genius fear and despise him, while those who can, revere and adore him. One gets the feeling that Crowley was saying this to himself for a long time. When I first read the book in 1975 I knew nothing about Crowley’s life and accepted his idealized self-portrait at face value; it was, I admit, one of the reasons why I went on to pursue magick. Reading it again, knowing Crowley’s depressing and turbulent life, I find it often heartbreaking. Crowley’s unsatisfied hunger for recognition is simultaneously repellent and poignant.

  Collins was so impressed with The Diary of a Drug Fiend that they commissioned Crowley to write an autobiography, what later became The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, giving him a £120 advance, twice as much as for the Diary. Crowley could feel that finally, after all his toil, he would receive the recognition he deserved; he could also feel confident that a modest income could be had from his pen—or Leah’s. When the book appeared in November, the literary reviews were not glowing, but neither were they scathing. They were, all in all, respectful and encouraging. For The Times Literary Supplement—London’s literary Holy Grail—the book teemed with an “amazing fertility of incidents and ideas” and was rife with an “amazingly rich crop of rhetoric . . . and verbiage.” The Observer found it had a “compelling power” in its “descriptions of degradation.” Yet not all were so tolerant.

  James Douglas, a columnist for the Sunday Express, had already attacked James Joyce’s Ulysses—for many years considered obscene—and Aldous Huxley’s inoffensive Antic Hay. Like de Wend-Fenton, Douglas was a self-proclaimed moral watchdog, and Crowley’s novel made him growl. The Diary of a Drug Fiend was, he wrote, a “book for burning.” Douglas’s growls had increased sales for Joyce and Huxley, but such was not Crowley’s luck. The Express smelled blood and attacked. All the old mud came up and was slung at the Big Lion, and new revelations were added. Following Douglas’s attack, the Express launched an all-out assault, aided by an interview with Mary Butts. “Complete Exposure of ‘Drug Fiend’ Author,” the banner read, “Black Record of Aleister Crowley.” Mary was handed an opportunity to retaliate for her portrait in the book and took it. She spoke of “profligacy and vice,” “bestial orgies”—the unfortunate goat—and other depravities. A woman, Betty Bickers, who knew Crowley, also revealed that he had borrowed money from her that he never repaid. This supported the erroneous charge that Crowley had stolen £200 from a widow. The “widow” was Laura Grahame, from whom he had extracted (exactly how remains ambiguous) the £100 with which Allan Bennett had sailed to Ceylon. Other articles followed, accusing Crowley of, among others things, running a prostitute ring in Palermo; it was untrue, but it was the sort of thing Crowley delighted in. Once again friends urged him to sue, but Crowley could not afford legal costs.

  The book quickly sold out its first run of three thousand copies, but Collins, cowed by the bad press, didn’t reprint and quietly let it fade away. They also canceled the Confessions, although Crowley did keep the advance. The irony is that there is nothing obscene in The Diary of a Drug Fiend; Crowley, knowing well the depths of addiction, depicted them sincerely, even if he was equally sincere about the delights of indulgence. It didn’t matter; he took a beating. Sensational half-true accounts about lurid sex and drug-filled rituals sold papers. How much Crowley had himself to blame is debatable.

  While The Diary of a Drug Fiend was under attack, Crowley was in Cefalù, enjoying, to some degree, the publicity. As synchronicity would have it, on the very Sunday—November 26, 1922—that the Express exposed the “orgies in Sicily,” Crowley welcomed a couple who would spell doom for the abbey. Crowley had met Betty May at the Café Royal in 1914. She didn’t like the Beast, but Betty’s career was as checkered as his. She had grown up in a Limehouse brothel. After working as an artist’s model in her teens, she had joined the Apaches in Paris, where she helped the gang relieve rich customers of their francs. She became known as the Tiger Woman and later returned to London and again took up modeling; she was introduced to Crowley by the sculptor Jacob Epstein. Like Crowley, she used cocaine and was a heavy drinker. She had already run through two husbands and had hit thirty when she met Frederick Charles Loveday—a much younger man who liked to be called Raoul—and married him. Loveday was not her usual type. He had a first in history from Oxford, but Loveday also had a wild side. At Oxford he belonged to the Hypocrites Club, a society of thrill seekers, and Loveday seems to have been its leading light. He
once climbed the Martyrs’ Memorial to put a chamber pot on its top; on another occasion he fell from a roof onto a spiked railing that impaled his thigh. He also had a fascination with ancient Egypt and the occult and had read much of Crowley.

  Betty Bickers—who had unwisely loaned Crowley money—was putting up the Beast, who had left his room in Wellington Square. Crowley gave lectures at her place, and at one of these Betty introduced him to Raoul. Crowley took an instant liking to Loveday, sensing in him another Neuburg or Maitland. When he invited Raoul to a private interview, Betty May tried to put him off. But Loveday was hooked, and three days later he returned to Betty’s flat, his breath reeking of ether and with a strange look in his eyes. He had been astrally traveling with the Beast the whole time and had only escaped by climbing out of the window and down a drainpipe. A few days later Crowley turned up at their door in his kilt, wig, and lipstick—perhaps his failure with Russell made him take precautions—and invited himself to dinner. As had Frances Gregg, Betty feared the worst. Crowley—an occult bully who liked threatening women—took note and told Betty she would soon be cooking for him.