by Gary Lachman
48.Aleister Crowley, The Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley Tunisia 1923, ed. Stephen Skinner (York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1996), 122.
49.Crowley, The Confessions, 403.
50.Ibid., 104–5.
51.Ibid.
52.Ibid., 460.
53.Ibid., 142.
54.Ibid.
55.Ibid., 143.
56.Ibid., 113.
57.Ibid., 123–24.
58.William Breeze, Introduction to Aleister Crowley, White Stains (Stockholm: Edda, 2011), xiv.
59.Crowley, The Confessions, 142–44.
60.Paul Newman, Aleister Crowley and the Cult of Pan (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2004), 63.
61.Aleister Crowley, Aceldama (1898), complete text at http://hermetic.com/crowley/collected-works/i/aceldama.html.
62.Newman, Aleister Crowley and the Cult of Pan, 75.
63.Crowley, The Confessions, 343–44.
64.“It will be a marvellous thing—the true personality of man—when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.” Full text at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/.
65.Crowley, The Confessions, 124.
66.Ibid., 126.
67.Ibid.
68.Ibid., 127.
69.For more on Karl von Eckartshausen and The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary, see my Dedalus, 2010, 34–37.
TWO: TWILIGHT OF THE GOLDEN DAWN
1.Wilkinson, Seven Friends, 53.
2.See Gary Lachman, Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2012), 245–48.
3.http://hermetic.com/crowley/collected-works/i/jephthah.html.
4.Symonds, The Great Beast, 30.
5.See Gary Lachman, Politics and the Occult (Wheaton, Il: Quest, 2008), 53–59.
6.Ibid.
7.Churton, Aleister Crowley, xv–xvi.
8.Wilson, Aleister Crowley; Wilkinson, Seven Friends, 53.
9.Wilkinson, Seven Friends, 59.
10.Crowley, The Confessions, 176.
11.Another, less romantic account of the Golden Dawn’s origin has the cipher originating with Kenneth Mackenzie, a colleague of Westcott and Mathers in an earlier occult group, the Society of Eight, whose specialty was alchemy. MacKenzie had met Eliphas Levi in Paris in the French occultist’s last days. After Mackenzie’s death his widow passed on his Masonic papers to Westcott, and the cipher papers were among them. The cipher papers themselves may have come to Mackenzie from Levi; we recall that material on the tarot was included in them, and during his visit Mackenzie discussed the tarot with Levi. Where Levi may have got them from is unclear. See R. A. Gilbert’s The Golden Dawn: Twilight of the Magicians (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian, 1983).
12.Although Blavatsky’s Masters were Hindus, there is a good argument that the notion of “Secret Chiefs” has its source in the “unknown superiors” of the Strict Observance Freemasonry of Karl Gottlieb von Hund, which began in France in the 1740s. “Strict Observance” got its name because the rite required a vow of absolute obedience to the mysterious “unknown superiors” who were its leaders. Hund claimed that in 1743 he was initiated into the rite by a masked man known only as “the Knight of the Red Feather.” Madame Blavatsky’s great-grandfather—whose occult library started her on her esoteric career—belonged to a Russian Strict Observance lodge, and his loyalty to his “unknown superiors” may have inspired Blavatsky’s own obedience to her Hidden Masters. Another possible source for the Secret Chiefs is the mysterious Rabbi Samuel Jacob Chayyim Falk, an enigmatic character at the hub of esoteric life in London in the eighteenth century, and who counted Swedenborg and Cagliostro as his students. In 1889, in the notices page of a literary magazine, Westcott himself suggested that “the Order of mystics which gave Eliphas Levi [the great nineteenth-century French occultist] his occult knowledge, and of which Johann Falk was at one time the Lecturer on the Kabbalah in London, is still at work in England” and he names it “the Hermetic students of the G.D.” (For much of the Golden Dawn’s early history, the meaning of the initials G. D., like that of the A...A..., remained secret.) It is possible, though doubtful, that Falk himself was the “hidden superior” that initiated Karl Gottlieb von Hund in Paris. (See Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994], 223.)
13.Quoted in Wilson, Aleister Crowley, 48.
14.William Butler Yeats, Autobiographies (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 126–27.
15.Abramelin the Mage is said to have been an Egyptian who taught his magic to Abraham of Worms (1362–1458), a German Jew who met him in Egypt. Some scholars believe the ritual to have been written by the German Jewish Talmud scholar Rabbi Yaakov Moelin (1365–1427). The version that Mathers translated was most likely a French translation of a German edition from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
16.Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life (York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1983), 183.
17.Churton, Aleister Crowley, 55.
18.Ibid.
19.Crowley, The Confessions, 182.
20.Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 71.
21.http://www.highlandclubscotland.co.uk/Around-Loch-Ness/Beast-of-Boleskine.php.
22.Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 77.
23.Symonds, The Great Beast, 51.
24.Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 151.
25.Crowley, The Confessions, 182.
26.Ibid., 194.
27.Ibid.
28.Ibid., 195–96.
29.For a description of the vault see Symonds, The Great Beast, 48–49. Christian Rosenkreutz was said to have been born in 1378 and to have died in 1484 at the age of 106. He traveled through the Holy Lands and North Africa in search of secret knowledge. When he returned to Europe he founded the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, a society dedicated to spreading hermetic wisdom and healing the sick. In 1614 strange manifestoes appeared in Germany speaking of the Rosicrucians. They claimed to have discovered Rosenkreutz’s hidden tomb and to be carrying on his work. See Lachman, Politics and the Occult, 1–7.
30.The subsequent history of the various offshoots of the original Golden Dawn can be followed in Ellic Howe’s classic The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1978) and R. A. Gilbert’s exhaustive Revelations of the Golden Dawn (Slough, UK: W. Foulsham & Co., 1997). For a full account of the order’s rituals and practices Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn (Saint Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1986) remains the most reliable source.
31.See E. J. Dingwall, Some Human Oddities (Whitefish, MO: Kessinger Publishing, 2003); Wilson, Aleister Crowley, 63–67; and Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 75.
THREE: THE WORD OF THE AEON
1.Crowley, The Confessions, 202.
2.http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/aqc/crowley.html.
3.http://hermetic.com/crowley/articles/i-make-myself-invisible.html.
4.Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2011), 69.
5.Crowley himself recognized there was something wrong with this arrangement, and that it pointed toward a kind of insanity. Speaking of his mother, he wrote, “In a way, my mother was insane, in the sense that all people are who have watertight compartments to the brain, and hold with equal pass
ion incompatible ideas, and hold them apart lest their meeting should destroy both.” (Crowley, The Confessions, 387.)
6.Ibid., 204.
7.Ibid., 214.
8.Ibid., 223.
9.John Symonds says that the affair with Alice taught Crowley that “he was not made for love.” (Symonds, The Great Beast, 58.) Israel Regardie disagreed. Crowley was not incapable of love, he tells us, but “he was incapable of a permanent, interpersonal relationship or marriage.” (Israel Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle [Phoenix, AZ: Falcon Press, 1989], 224–25.) What this amounts to is that Crowley was capable of lust, or at best, passionate romantic love, but not the kind of commitment and durable affection that most of us recognize as mature love. That he “fell in love” on a regular basis is evidence not that he was capable of love but that he never matured beyond irresponsible infatuations.
10.Aleister Crowley, Eight Lectures on Yoga (Las Vegas, NV: New Falcon Publications, 1991), 13, 16.
11.Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle, 253.
12.Bennett is often regarded as the first Englishman to be ordained as a Buddhist monk. Another Englishman thought to precede him is Gordon Douglas, Bhikkhu Asoka, who was ordained in Siam in 1899 and died soon after. Little is known about him. Another name given as an even earlier European monk is U Dhammaloka, an Irish migrant worker whose given name is unknown and who was ordained in Burma around the same time or slightly earlier than Douglas, depending on your sources. See Stephen Batchelor, The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1994).
13.Crowley, The Confessions, 270–71.
14.Complete text available at http://www.thomasvoxfire.com/pdf/Berashith.pdf.
15.http://www.the-equinox.org/vol1/no5/eqi05005.html.
16.Symonds, The Great Beast, 63.
17.Crowley, The Confessions, 282–83.
18.Ibid., 289.
19.http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/death_sakkara_gallery_03.shtml.
20.Crowley, The Confessions, 335.
21.Ibid., 335–37.
22.Lawrence Sutin suggests that Snowdrops “may be best described as a satire—and wildly lewd celebration of Victorian pornography” (Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 107), but this strikes me as another example of how Crowley avoids responsibility for his questionable works by arguing that he was “only kidding.” That someone intent on contacting his Holy Guardian Angel should occupy himself with such drivel is instructive. The complete text of Snowdrops is available at http://www.100thmonkeypress.com/biblio/acrowley/books/snowdrops_1903/snow drops.pdf.
23.W. Somerset Maugham, The Magician (London: Pan Books, 1978), 7.
24.Gerald Kelly, in Alpine Journal 65 (1960), 68.
25.Ibid., 361.
26.Ibid., 355.
27.The text is available at http://hermetic.com/eidolons/The_Initiated_Interpretation_of_Ceremonial_Magic.
28.Crowley, The Confessions, 370.
29.Ibid.
30.Ibid., 375.
31.Ibid., 380.
32.Ibid., 387.
FOUR: WHAT IS THE LAW?
1.Crowley, The Confessions, 393.
2.Ibid., 397.
3.Lachman, Jung, 113.
4.Ibid., 123.
5.Ibid., 213–24.
6.Stephan Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1982), 8–9.
7.Lachman, Madame Blavatsky, 102.
8.Wilson Van Dusen, The Presence of Other Words: The Findings of Swedenborg (London: Wildwood House, 1975), 117–38.
9.Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976), 75.
10.See Gary Lachman, A Secret History of Consciousness (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2003), 145–46.
11.Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness, 75.
12.Ibid., 86.
13.Lachman, A Secret History, 144–45. Auditory hallucinations are a common experience of the hypnagogic state, the twilight no-man’s-land between sleeping and waking, which many researchers have argued is “self-symbolic.” See Lachman, A Secret History, 85–94.
14.Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1979), 102.
15.J. F. Henley, The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rilke (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983), 87.
16.We may remark that Christianity, too, has its own threesomes: God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as well as Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.
17.There are many editions of The Book of the Law, or Liber Al Vel Legis, as it is known to thelemites. I am using the Booklegger/Albion edition, n.d., which was published in the 1970s. The reference here is technically AL III:3, that is, the third part, third line. The similarity to biblical references is instructive.
18.Ibid., I:49.
19.Ibid., I:3.
20.Ibid., I:42.
21.Crowley, The Confessions, 41.
22.The Book of the Law, II:58.
23.Ibid., I:41.
24.Ibid., II:33.
25.In Turn Off Your Mind, I argue that much of the radical politics of the 1960s was motivated by similar ideas. See 357–59.
26.Crowley, The Book of the Law, II:52.
27.Ibid., III:44, I:62.
28.Ibid., I:51.
29.Ibid., II:17; Algernon Swinburne, “Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs),” full text at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174550.
30.The Book of the Law, I:64, 65.
31.Ibid., I:10; II:18, 21.
32.Ibid., II:22.
33.Crowley, The Confessions, 396.
34.Ibid., 403.
35.Wilson, Aleister Crowley, 74; Crowley, The Confessions, 398.
36.The Book of the Law, I:22.
37.Otto Gross (1877–1920), for a time considered Freud’s most brilliant disciple, advocated a blend of Freudian psychology and Nietzschean individualism. He was a champion of “free love,” fathering illegitimate children, and drug use, principally morphine and cocaine; he died a drug addict in Berlin, where he was found freezing and starving in the street. A social anarchist, Gross expressed his contempt for bourgeois society by, among other ways, refusing to bathe. Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a writer on philosophy, sociology, pornography, and anthropology, and for a brief time was associated with the Surrealist movement. An advocate of a dark, nihilistic mysticism, he was fascinated by the idea of human sacrifice and formed a secret society, Acéphale, whose symbol was a decapitated man. Bataille and other members had planned to carry out a sacrificial ritual but were prevented by the outbreak of World War II. Like Crowley, Bataille was obsessed with transgression, debasement, and sex. Both Gross and Bataille embodied a philosophy of excess not unlike Crowley’s. Gross’s writings were minimal and he was most influential as a kind of analytical guru, principally in Munich’s bohemian quarter Schwabing and the early “alternative” commune Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland. Bataille’s philosophy of excess is presented in his book The Accursed Share (1946–49). In “When the Music’s Over,” Jim Morrison writes “We want the world and we want it now!” Iggy Pop wrote a song called “I Need More,” “More venom, more dynamite, more disaster / I need more than I ever did before.”
38.Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 67.
39.Hermann Hesse, My Belief (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), 71.
40.Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 127–28.
41.Hesse, My Belief, 77–81.
42.Quoted in David Richards, The Hero’s Quest for the Self (Maryland: University Press of America, 1987), 101.
43.The Book of the Law, II:71, 72.
44.Israel Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle, 253.
45.Crowley, The Confessions, 414.
46.Symonds, The Great Beast, 99.
47.Crowley, The Confessions, 432.
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48.Ibid., 430, 433.
49.Ibid., 440.
50.Ibid.
51.Ibid.
52.Au Kangchenjunga. Voyage et explorations dans l’Himalaya du Sikhim et du Népal. Echo des Alpes, Nos 8 et 9. 1914, quoted in Symonds, The Great Beast, 106.