by Gary Lachman
Yorke and Regardie often met at Crowley’s flat, where Regardie lived. Here they were subjected to the Beast’s unnerving regimen of late hours, chess, cigar and pipe smoke, copious alcohol, and drugs. They were also concerned that, in Regardie’s words, he would try some “homosexual monkey tricks” on them, but Crowley didn’t. Regardie remained at Crowley’s side for four years, but eventually broke with him in 1932 over “the nasty, petty, vicious louse that occasionally he was.” One would only question that “occasionally,” but like many who encountered Crowley’s venom, Regardie often minimized Crowley’s nastiness and emphasized his own unworthiness. Even without the sex, there was something of a dominance/submission relationship between them. When, after separating, Regardie sent Crowley a copy of one of his books, and Crowley replied negatively, Regardie wrote a petulant letter, calling Crowley “Alice” and saying he was a “contemptible bitch.”28 Crowley retaliated, circulating an anonymous letter in which, as he did with Neuburg, he berates Regardie for his Jewishness, and compiles a litany of his failings, including constipation, masturbation, and gonorrhea. (Oddly, Regardie publishes this piece of turpitude in full.) Their unedifying exchange is like that between two “queens” caught in a catfight. Yet Regardie’s book, The Eye in the Triangle, written in response to John Symonds’s The Great Beast, often gives the impression that it doth protest Crowley’s innocence too much, and is thereby suspect; at the end of it, Regardie himself admits that it is with real relief that he can unburden himself of the task of exonerating Crowley. After Crowley, Regardie went on to join the Stella Matutina, a Golden Dawn offshoot, and to write a series of intelligent books bringing together insights from alchemy, Jungian analysis, and Reichian therapy. His Tree of Life, one of the first books on magick I read, which synthesizes Crowley’s system with that of the Golden Dawn, remains a classic. He did, however, pull a Crowley himself when he gathered the Golden Dawn material that he vowed to keep secret and, breaking his oaths, published it in The Golden Dawn (1937–1940).
Not long after Regardie arrived, Kasimira Bass departed. Regardie was asked to break the news. On hearing it, Crowley reflected that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. He was most likely happy she departed as Kasimira seems to have had a mind of her own. Her place was soon filled. The fortyish Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar, a native of Nicaragua, had considerable magical potential and Crowley called her the High Priestess of Voodoo. They met at the end of 1928 and were soon enmeshed in the sexual, emotional, and magical turbulence that invariably accompanied Crowley’s affairs.
Much of this time Crowley was occupied with the publication of his magnum opus, Magick in Theory and Practice, a continuation of his earlier Book Four. Synthesizing Western and Eastern occult systems, and binding the lot with the law of thelema, the work is full of Crowley’s obsessions and erudite but obscure humor. As mentioned earlier, it is not, in any way, written for “all,” despite Crowley’s protestations. For connoisseurs it remains rich fare, but for the average reader it is impenetrable, or, at best, an acquired taste. Crowley recaps material presented in Book Four and introduces the Beast, Scarlet Woman, and Whore of Babalon; I mention the rituals, exercises, and reading lists in the introduction. In essence Crowley tries to modernize magick, to free it of its traditional encumbrances, to anchor it in the psyche and imagination of the magician. But he is too fond of hinting at hidden knowledge, giving the work twists and turns that either fascinate or befuddle, but are clearly meant to entice the reader to seek him out. And he can’t avoid a generous sprinkling of his sardonic wit. In chapter XII, “Of the Bloody Sacrifice,” after assessing the virtues of different sacrificial animals, Crowley drops a subtle bombshell. “A male of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory and suitable victim,” he writes, adding, in a poker-faced footnote, that Frater Perdurabo made this sacrifice 150 times a year between 1912 and 1928.29 Crowley isn’t speaking of child sacrifice, but of his own sperm. Magick has no direct sexual references, but for those who know, they are there. Crowley surely chuckled at the readers who took his remark seriously. But why shouldn’t they, given he went out of his way to present himself as some demonic wizard? In any case, the readers Crowley wanted to shock with this adolescent gag never even looked at the book.
One interesting passage escapes mention by most of Crowley’s commentators. Speaking of the Astral Plane, Crowley writes that the magician “may go for a long time being fooled and flattered by the Astrals that he has himself modified or manufactured.” “They will,” he writes, “pretend to show him marvelous mysteries.” He “will incline to accept them as true, for the very reason that they are the images of himself idealized by imagination.” “He will become increasingly interested in himself, imagine himself to be attaining one initiation after another. His Ego will expand unchecked, till he seems to himself to have heaven at his feet. Yet all this will be nothing but the fool’s face of Narcissus smirking up from the pool that will drown him.”30 Readers may detect a similarity here with Crowley’s dark musings following his expulsion from Cefalù. Did Crowley know he was talking about himself?
Crowley didn’t trust magick to make Magick a success. He hired a publicity agent to revamp his public profile. C. Vidal Hunt took on the daunting task of relaunching Crowley’s career. Hunt, however, soon discovered that Crowley could be his own worst enemy. He could not, Hunt complained, “act pretty over a cup of tea”—that is, make a good impression—nor could he be taught new tricks. Crowley had, it seems, “crystallized,” to use Gurdjieff’s term. Even with his own best interests at stake, he couldn’t act “out of character.” Hunt had other problems with Crowley. Hunt tried to embroil Crowley in a scheme involving a rich American widow and a pauper Spanish aristocrat. Crowley was to cook up a phony horoscope informing the millionairess that Don Luis Fernando de Bourbon was Mr. Right. Crowley thought astrology was only minimally true, but to his credit he declined, and even warned the rich American about the scheme.31 Hunt was not happy and he took his displeasure to the Sûreté Géneralé. Hunt was not the only person to mention Crowley to the French authorities. Regardie’s sister’s concerns had also reached them. Whether it was Hunt, Regardie’s sister, or some other influence, on January 17, 1929, Crowley was visited by an inspector from the Préfecture de Police. The encounter has the air of a Marx Brothers film. After questions about his past, drugs, magick, and Kabbalah—the inspector expressed a surprising wish to study it—the conversation shifted to a mysterious device Crowley had resting on a table. Crowley believed that the befuddled flic thought it was a bomb, or an apparatus for distilling cocaine, but it was only a harmless espresso machine—although that a Parisian would not know this strikes me as unlikely.
Crowley believed he had made a good impression, but the flic’s superiors did not, as a month later the Minister of the Interior issued a refus de séjour—an expulsion order—for Crowley, the High Priestess, and the Serpent.32 They had twenty-four hours to leave France. Crowley managed to extend his stay, claiming illness; he would not leave until he had a copy of Magick in his hands. As no English publisher would touch it, Gerald Yorke and Karl Germer paid for a French publisher, the Lecram Press, to produce it. Regardie and Señora de Miramar had managed British visas, but Crowley’s doctor’s certificate allowed him to stay. The Serpent and the High Priestess, however, soon hit a bump. The British authorities refused entry and as soon as they arrived they were summarily shipped back to France. Eventually they obtained Belgian visas and reached Brussels nearly a week after leaving Paris.
On April 12 Crowley received a copy of his masterpiece. He was ecstatic. Yet when it was released to the public, the book Crowley had written for all received few, if any, reviews, and was ignored by the Banker, Biologist, Grocer, and Factory Girl whose lives he had hoped to fulfill through it. It must have been disappointing; another advertisement for his new aeon had drawn a blank. Less than a week later he was heading to Brussels, where he stayed for a short time, reunited with his Scarlet Wom
an. But soon enough he was heading across the Channel. A Colonel Carter of Scotland Yard had contacted Gerald Yorke—the two knew each other through Masonic connections—and had warned him about associating with Crowley. Yorke convinced Carter that the Beast was not as black as he was painted, and according to one account, it was Carter himself who paid for Crowley’s voyage back to Britain. Carter, it seems, had plans for Crowley, and the two soon met with Yorke at dinner. Crowley wanted to confirm his legal standing, and Carter was interested in helping Crowley, in return for favors to be called in later. Crowley, at any rate, had no trouble returning to England. The tabloids growled about his evil doings, but the authorities apparently turned a blind eye.
Yet if Magick had received no notice, Crowley’s expulsion certainly did. It hit the international papers; in France even a “true crime” magazine, Detective, sported Crowley in his Ku Klux Klannish hood on its cover and reported his fiendish deeds.33 In an interview Crowley, ever the martyr, compared his plight to the famous Dreyfus case of the nineteenth century; the irony of an anti-Semite comparing the tragedy of a Jew wrongly accused and sent to Devil’s Island to his own situation escaped him.34 The most likely reason the French expelled Crowley was his pro-German work in America, and the fact that he was the head of a German occult organization. He was understandably suspected of being a German spy.
As had happened with Leah and Norman Mudd, in Brussels the Serpent and the High Priestess were thrown into each other’s arms. Or more likely the matronly High Priestess took charge of the young Serpent and performed an unscheduled opus. Regardie was concerned about the impropriety—what would the master think?—but soon enough there were new troubles. Now the Belgians wanted them out, too. Regardie, who was after all British born, should have been allowed entry to England. He was discovering what learning from Crowley was all about. Eventually Regardie somehow managed to enter Britain; most likely Colonel Carter helped. Karl Germer rescued Señora de Miramar, transporting her to Leipzig, where she stayed with the helpful Martha Küntzel. Soon after, Crowley arrived and on August 16, he and the High Priestess married. The main reason was to facilitate Maria’s entry into England; it was a union of practicality, not passion. Yet like all his others, it would not last.
One reason Crowley wanted to be in London was to find a publisher. He had completed the Confessions and it needed a home. It found one in June when Crowley met P. R. Stephenson, who ran the small Mandrake Press with his partner, Edward Goldston. Their offices were on Museum Street, near the British Museum. Stephenson admired rebels; he had recently published a collection of D. H. Lawrence’s erotic paintings and he saw in Crowley another warrior against repression. Stephenson offered Crowley a £50 advance for the Confessions and Moonchild and a collection of stories, The Stratagem and Other Stories. Stephenson himself wrote a book attacking Crowley’s treatment in the press, but The Legend of Aleister Crowley, intended to attract potential readers, was a failure, as were Crowley’s books. Bookshops refused to carry the Confessions; the enormous A of Crowley’s signature on the cover, clearly an erect penis and testicles, could not have helped, likewise his equally phallic idealized self-portrait. Crowley had only himself to blame, but the work itself is in no way blasphemous. It is a very readable, often insightful, and occasionally brilliant account by an unabashed egoist of his undeniably unusual life. One tires of his tireless self-regard and self-justification, but then this is true of Casanova, Rousseau, and other celebrated self-proclaimers. Only the first two volumes appeared in 1930; the remaining four languished until an abridged one-volume edition appeared in 1969, edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant. That posthumous edition was something of a bestseller, but 1969 was not 1930. Eventually Crowley fell out with Stephenson and Goldston, and a reborn Mandrake Press with Gerald Yorke, Karl Germer, and Robin Thyme—who we will return to—at the helm did not do much better.
In February 1930, Arthur Calder-Marshall, of the Oxford Poetry Society, invited Crowley to give a talk. Rather than speak of his earliest passion, Crowley decided to lecture on the fifteenth-century child murderer Gilles de Rais. Predictably, when the authorities found out, they banned the lecture. Crowley printed it as a pamphlet and had sandwich-board men hawk it on the streets. The controversy helped sales, but that was the lecture’s only attraction; it is a tedious march over well-trodden anti-Christian ground. Other speed bumps appeared. Later that year Crowley tried to exhibit his paintings, but no gallery would accept them. Even the Mandrake Press refused to hang them; the flack they got showing D. H. Lawrence’s canvases informed their decision. When his estate agent, courtesy of an article in John Bull, discovered that Crowley was trying to exhibit his work near an apartment he wished to rent, he refused to rent him the flat. Crowley got the message. He gathered a large collection of works and decided to return to Germany, where he was appreciated.
By this time his marriage to the High Priestess was kaput. She was drinking heavily, was hysterical, and in general falling apart. On an earlier visit to Germany, she and the Beast quarreled viciously. Crowley consoled himself by discovering nineteen-year-old Hanni Jaegger in the studio of an artist acquaintance. While Crowley predictably fell in love with Hanni, Maria sank deeper into drink. She became unmanageable and he was forced to leave her with Martha Küntzel in Leipzig while he returned to England. When Maria returned too, they took a flat in Knightsbridge, but her days as the Scarlet Woman were over. She had become an embarrassment and made drunken advances to any male who turned up; that Crowley paid her less and less attention may have contributed to this. On August 1, 1930, Crowley headed for Berlin. At his farewell party, Maria drank herself unconscious and he left her on the floor. He cut off all financial ties and instructed his lawyers to start divorce proceedings immediately. “Dismissed wife, without notice,” he noted in his diary. The marriage had lasted less than a year. As he had with Leah, Crowley dumped Maria on others, Gerald Yorke in this instance. Maria was penniless and on her way to a lunatic asylum, and Yorke had to deal with it.
Young Hanni rejuvenated the fifty-four-year-old Perdurabo, who was doing very little magick but much thelema. After a romp in Berlin Crowley and his Scarlet Teenager headed to London, the first leg on another magical retirement. Avoiding Maria, who was languishing in Hampstead—Gerald Yorke had found her a place—Crowley and his nymph raced to Southampton, en route to Lisbon. Crowley had been corresponding with the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. The two had much in common: both played chess, were interested in the occult, and shared an addiction to alter egos. In Pessoa’s case, this manifested in the many heteronyms he devised—not mere pseudonyms, but actual other literary personalities, other characters, whom he invented to author his poems.35 Pessoa was an Anglophile; he had translated Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” and included it in Presenca (1931), one of the few of his works published in his lifetime. At first Hanni proved excellent at opera, especially p.v.n., and Crowley christened her “The Monster.” She had unusual desires and apparently liked Crowley to use her as a WC—a toilet.36 He had other lovers, too, with whom he enjoyed “psychological cruelty,” but apparently Hanni only complained about being forced to watch Karl Germer masturbate.37 Unsurprisingly, she was less than stable and soon into their whirlwind adventure, she, too, started to unravel. After a ferocious argument, Crowley and his waif had to leave their hotel. While Crowley checked into a new one, Hanni bolted. She vanished and Crowley confided his concerns to Pessoa. A few days later he found her; she was booked on the next boat heading to Germany. All his entreaties failed; the American consul had advised her to head home as soon as possible. Crowley was desperate. What could he do?
He decided, with the help of Pessoa, to fake a suicide. At the Boca do Inferno (“The Mouth of Hell”), an arched rock formation near the sea, he took a leaf from Sherlock Holmes and left a note weighed down by his cigarette case.38 “I cannot live without you,” it read. Crowley then headed for Germany. Pessoa spread the story and the press ran with it. Mysterious disappearance of infamous bla
ck magician. Had the Beast finally bought it? Was there foul play? In Berlin, Crowley found Hanni and they patched things up, temporarily; he even got her to write a letter accusing the American consul in Lisbon of sexual harassment. Then, on October 11, the day before his fifty-fifth birthday, the mystery was solved, and the world breathed a sigh of relief. The Beast was back, and his paintings adorned the Gallery Neumann-Nierendorf in Berlin. Among them were portraits of Mudd, Leah, and Aldous Huxley, whom Crowley had met recently. Again, Crowley garnered some press—the main idea—but no paintings sold and things were not exactly wunderbar with Hanni. She was deeply depressed, sobbed constantly, and spoke often of suicide; she would, in fact, kill herself, not long after her predecessor was committed to a mental home.
Maria was not doing well. Even when Colonel Carter advised Crowley to return to London to take care of his wife, the Beast did not respond. Crowley informed Maria that she should file for divorce, and he obligingly admitted to forty-seven acts of adultery with Hanni since August 3 as evidence—not much, he agreed, but he had been traveling. It was around this time that both Yorke and Regardie threw up their hands at the master. Not long before, Maria had had to enter a public workhouse; she had no money and her association with Crowley prevented her from finding work. On June 16, 1931, Maria was admitted to the Colney Hatch lunatic asylum, suffering from paranoia, manic depression, and delusions. She believed she was George V’s daughter and was married to her brother, the Prince of Wales, but she also harbored weird ideas about being the Scarlet Woman of the Beast 666—her doctors were unaware of Crowley’s ministry. By this time Hanni, too, had left.
Crowley was unfazed. He had already met Hanni’s replacement. On Berlin’s Unter den Linden, thirty-six-year-old Bertha Busch—he would call her Billie—approached Crowley. She was just the thing he needed: into S&M, p.v.n., drugs, drink, and the rest. Crowley threw himself into the Weimar twilight, a grinning golem let loose in Cabaret. He and Billie liked to fight. On one occasion, some Nazi Youths roughed him up when they caught him slapping her against a wall. On another she stabbed him with a butcher knife. For a time Crowley shared a flat with Gerald Hamilton, the model for Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris in his Berlin Stories. One time Hamilton returned home and found Billie drugged and trussed up with a note saying not to release her. On another occasion, finding Billie stark naked on the freezing floor, Hamilton woke Crowley and asked if she was ill. “Hasn’t that bitch gone to bed yet?” a half-dressed Crowley asked before landing Billie a vicious kick. The flat was usually strewn with broken dishes, Billie’s favorite mode of defense, and on more than one occasion a doctor had to give Billie a sedative, usually a morphine injection. Karl Germer did not like her—she was not, he felt, true Scarlet Woman material—but Crowley paraded Billie around, introducing her to people such as Isherwood and the poet Stephen Spender, who visited Crowley at his flat. Isherwood relates how he once saw Crowley trail his fingernail—long repellent things—down the bare chest of a stud in a Berlin boy bar, and how he just escaped being beaten up. “The truly awful thing about Crowley,” Isherwood wrote, “is that one suspects he didn’t really believe in anything.”39 The only thing real about Crowley, Isherwood thought, was his drug addiction.