by Gary Lachman
53.Ibid.
54.Ibid., 108. Symonds also presents a letter from Righi giving “an example of the individual we had to deal with.” Righi quotes from a letter from Crowley to Guillarmod in which Crowley explains that, although useful, Righi is no gentleman and that they can send him packing if need be. This was after Righi had paid Crowley the equivalent of £100 in jewelry, carved lapis lazuli, and a Tibetan banner in order to join the expedition.
55.During a period of mental and emotional instability, Strindberg (1849–1912) believed that his estranged third wife, Harriet Bosse, came to him at night in an astral form and compelled him to make love. See August Strindberg, From an Occult Diary (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965).
56.Newman, Aleister Crowley and the Cult of Pan, 138.
57.Crowley, The Confessions, 460.
58.Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 415–22.
59.Crowley, The Confessions, 460.
60.Ibid., 509.
61.Ibid.
62.Ibid., 517.
63.Ibid., 465.
64.“Imaginal” is a term developed by the philosopher Henry Corbin to denote a plane of reality midway between the concrete physical world and the abstract world of pure ideas. Corbin’s Mundus Imaginalis or Imaginal World is not the imagination in the sense of “make believe” but in the sense that an artist or poet uses the imagination as a creative power. See my The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2011), 114.
65.See Frances Yates’s classic The Art of Memory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
66.Crowley, The Confessions, 518.
67.Ibid., 515.
FIVE: TOWARD THE SILVER STAR
1.The Book of the Law, III:43, 44.
2.Crowley, The Confessions, 527.
3.Martin Booth, A Magick Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000), 239–40.
4.Around the same time in Saint Petersburg, P. D. Ouspensky also experimented with drugs, nitrous oxide, and hashish, and he, too, had some spectacular results, which he recorded in his essay “Experimental Mysticism.” (P. D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969], 274–304.) Curiously, both Ouspensky and Crowley use a similar language to discuss aspects of their experience. Ouspensky speaks of certain symbols or forms conveying meaning to him and acting as “hieroglyphs.” “These signs constituted the form of speech or thought, or of what corresponded to speech or thought, in the state of consciousness I had attained. Signs or hieroglyphs moved and changed before me with dizzying rapidity . . .” (Ibid., 291.) Crowley writes “Simple impressions in normal consciousness are resolved by hashish into a concatenation of hieroglyphs of a purely symbolic type. Just as we represent a horse by the five letters h-o-r-s-e, none of which in itself has the smallest relation to a horse, so even a simpler concept such as the letter A seems resolved into a set of pictures, a fairly large number, possibly a constant number of them. These glyphs are perceived together, just as a skilled reader reads h-o-r-s-e as a single word, not letter by letter.” (Aleister Crowley, The Psychology of Hashish, chapter Vat [http://www.luminist.org/archives/psychology_of_hashish.htm].) It is doubtful that either read the other’s work, although Crowley did not think highly of Ouspensky’s ideas about the tarot, dismissing him in the same way that he did practically everyone except himself. Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1984), 201.
5.http://www.100thmonkeypress.com/biblio/acrowley/books/mr_crowley_and_the_creeds_1904/c_and_creeds_text.pdf.
6.Quoted in Crowley, The Confessions, 544. Alfred Richard Orage was a brilliant editor and critic and the central voice behind the New Age, a literary clearinghouse for “alternative” ideas in the early twentieth century. He was for a brief time interested in Crowley but was weaned off this by his lover, Beatrice Hastings, who later went on to write a book defending Madame Blavatsky from charges of fraud. Orage met P. D. Ouspensky just before World War I and through him became a leading disciple of Gurdjieff. See Lachman, In Search of P. D. Ouspensky, 177–189.
7.Ibid., 545.
8.Ibid., 534.
9.Ibid., 13.
10.http://hermetic.com/93beast.fea.st/files/section1/fuller/Star%20In%20the%20 West%20TNR.pdf.
11.Booth, A Magick Life, 294.
12.Crowley, The Confessions, 534.
13.Booth, A Magick Life, 243.
14.Ibid., 249.
15.Crowley, The Confessions, 542.
16.Symonds, The Great Beast, 125; Booth, A Magick Life, 251.
17.Booth, A Magick Life, 284.
18.Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle, 341.
19.Ibid., 322.
20.Readers can judge for themselves; two collections of Crowley’s short fiction are available: The Drug and Other Stories (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2010) and The Simon Iff Stories and Other Works (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2012).
21.http://hermetic.com/crowley/worlds-tragedy/.
22.Francis King, Megatherion: The Magical World of Aleister Crowley (n.p.: Creation Books, 2011), 47–49. Originally published as The Magical World of Aleister Crowley (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977).
23.Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 85–94.
24.Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (London: Granada Books, 1987), 69–70.
25.Quoted in King, Megatherion, 51–52.
26.Fritz Peters, My Journey with a Mystic (Laguna Niguel, CA: Tale Weaver Publishing, 1986).
27.Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2011), 65–69.
28.Havelock Ellis, “Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise” in The Contemporary Review January 1898; reprinted in The Drug Experience, ed. David Ebin (New York: The Orion Press, 1961), 223–236. Ellis had written about the drug’s purely physiological effects for The Lancet in 1897, and the German pharmacologist Louis Lewin also wrote about the drug in 1888.
29.Crowley, The Confessions, 589.
30.Ibid.
31.King, Megatherion, 66–67.
32.The Daily Sketch, August 24, 1910; reprinted in Booth, A Magick Life, 286–88, and King, Megatherion, 67–68.
33.Jean Overton Fuller, The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg (London: W. H. Allen, 1965), 176.
34.Crowley had apparently just been to Oxford, where he had copied some manuscripts by Dee. Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 199–200.
35.Symonds, The Great Beast, 126–45; and King, Megatherion, 55–63, have extended accounts of this episode, on which I have drawn.
36.Oddly, Timothy Leary, who based much of his career on Crowley’s, had a similar North African adventure. See Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 191–200.
37.Benjamin Wooley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Dr. Dee (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 287.
38.Crowley, The Confessions, 621.
39.Ibid.
40.Steiner speaks of the Guardian of the Threshold in Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1947), 231–44. The idea comes from the Rosicrucian novel Zanoni (1842) by Bulwer-Lytton. Crowley was certainly aware of Lytton’s work and in the Confessions speaks of the “Dweller in the Abyss.” (Crowley, The Confessions, 623.)
41.King, Megatherion, 61.
42.London Evening News, March 23, 1910.
43.http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWbottomley.htm.
SIX: SEX AND MAGICK
1.King, Megatherion, 47–49.
2.Wilson, Aleister Crowley, 97.
3.Fuller, The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg, 176.
4.Sandy Robertson, The Aleister Crowley Scrapbook (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1994), 64–81.
5.Crowley, The Confessions, 676.
6.Martin Booth, A Magick Life (London: Hodder & Stougton, 2000), 298.
7.Her other claim to fame is that she gave the scarf to her frien
d Isadora, which, on September 14, 1927, caught in the wheel of the open car the dancer was driving in and broke her neck.
8.A new edition, combining Book Four and Magick in Theory and Practice along with other material, is available. See Magick, ed. Mary Desti, Leila Waddell, Hymenaeus Beta (York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1998).
9.http://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/lib4.htm.
10.Ibid.
11.Crowley, The Confessions, 175.
12.Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1984), 49. See also Lachman, A Secret History of Consciousness, 241–245 and 202.
13.Crowley, The Confessions, 175.
14.Ibid., 174.
15.James Moore, Gurdjieff and Mansfield (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 18.
16.Spence, Secret Agent 666, 40.
17.Reuss was a frequent visitor to Monte Verità, “the Mountain of Truth,” an early “counterculture” commune established in Ascona, Switzerland, in 1900. Another frequent visitor to Monte Verità was the radical Freudian Otto Gross. Gross, like Crowley, was a drug enthusiast and advocate of “free love.” As far as I know, Crowley did not make it to Monte Verità, which is surprising, as it was in many ways his kind of place; in The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O., Francis King quotes an encyclical Reuss gave in Ascona in 1917 on the O.T.O. (King [London: C. W. Daniel Company, 1973], 9). Although Gross was not an occultist, his interest in sex and drugs would have endeared him to Crowley and one wonders if he and Reuss ever met. For more on Monte Verità and Gross see Martin Green, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona 1900–1920 (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1986); also Lachman, Politics and the Occult, 136–40. For a brief view of Gross and his relations with C. G. Jung, see Lachman, Jung, 72–75.
18.See Lachman, Politics and the Occult, 40–45.
19.See Lachman, Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality, 221, and Rudolf Steiner (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2007), 169–70.
20.Ibid., 116–19.
21.Although Randolph did preach sex magick, unlike Crowley he was averse to masturbation and homosexuality. See Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 361.
22.The meeting between Reuss and Crowley took place in 1912, but the publishing date of The Book of Lies is 1913. Crowley may have his dates wrong, or, as Francis King argues, the book may really have been published in 1912 and given an incorrect publishing date on purpose. It is, after all, The Book of Lies.
23.Reuss was on the lookout for esoteric heavy hitters to give the O.T.O. some credibility. In 1906 Rudolf Steiner met Reuss in Lugano, Switzerland, and soon after set up his own O.T.O. lodge. Steiner was also a visitor to Monte Verità and may have known Reuss from there. His connection to the O.T.O. was short-lived. See Lachman, Rudolf Steiner, 154–55.
24.Lachman, Madame Blavatsky, 314.
25.www.casebook.org/dissertations/collected-donston.8.html.
26.Fuller, The Magical Dilemma, 46. Crowley’s obsession with and inveterate overestimation of sex can be seen in his brief work “Of Eroto-Comatose Lucidity,” in which the magician is “sexually exhausted by every known means” and then sexually aroused “by every known means” repeatedly, until he (mostly; Crowley never, as far as I know, concerns himself with women’s sexuality) reaches a point in between sleeping and waking, the hypnagogic state. He can then commune with spirits. The ritual fails if the magician falls asleep but if successful can be celebrated by a final act of sex, or even “the most favorable death,” during orgasm. The only problem with this is that there are really very few “known means” of sexual arousal or exhaustion and in any case any intelligent person would soon grow bored with the process. Only an obsessive like Crowley would think sex could be continued indefinitely. And the required state can be achieved much more easily by simply drifting back into sleep after awakening and disciplining oneself to maintain the interphase between the two states. Rudolf Steiner suggested this was an excellent time to speak with the dead. See Earthly Death and Cosmic Life (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1964), 54–72; http://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib451.html.
27.Some of these can be found in Francis King’s The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O. (London: C. W. Daniel Company, 1973).
28.Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 347.
29.King, Megatherion, 85.
30.Valentine, New York Rocker, 234.
31.http://www.100thmonkeypress.com/biblio/acrowley/articles/1914_12_20_fort_wayne_journal_gazette.pdf.
32.In 2012 when my friends and I performed a live improvised soundtrack to Rex Ingram’s film The Magician, we took the name of Crowley’s troupe for our billing; http://radionicworkshop.co.uk/music/ for May 22, 2012.
33.Crowley, The Confessions, 712.
34.Aleister Crowley, The Magical Record of the Beast 666: The Diaries of Aleister Crowley, ed. John Symonds (London: Duckworth, 1972), 137.
35.For more on Hermes-Thoth, see my The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2011), 74–97.
36.Phallus worship was, of course, nothing new. In the Hindu religion the lingham, or phallus, is a sacred object, as is the yoni (vagina), and early statues of the Greek god Hermes generally depict him with an erection. In 1786 Richard Payne Knight published A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and Its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients, a seminal text that epitomizes the eighteenth-century fascination, among some scholars, with the generative powers. Not surprisingly, Knight’s work finds a place in the A...A... curriculum.
37.William Breeze, Introduction to The Drug and Other Stories (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2010), xi.
38.The notion that semen is the most precious substance in the male body is a basic tenet of yoga. Gurdjieff believed so, too, and the female sexual fluids are likewise believed to contain kalas, or secret energies that are released in intercourse. See Arthur Koestler, The Lotus and the Robot (New York: Harper Colophon, 1960), 93; Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound: Myths, Realities, and Meanings of Menstruation (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 194; and G. I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, First Book (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 275–76.
39.In Portable Darkness: An Aleister Crowley Reader, ed. Scott Michalsen (New York: Harmony Books, 1989), 164.
40.Ibid., 145.
41.Ibid., 161, 147.
42.Ibid., 147. This was a pet idea of Crowley’s for which there seems no evidence.
43.Ibid., 155.
44.Ibid., 161–62.
45.Ibid., 162.
46.Crowley, The Magical Record, 3.
47.There is some debate that per vas nefandum refers to sex during menstruation, but although The Book of the Law tells us that “the best blood is of the moon, monthly,” Crowley’s preference for sodomy is clear. But Crowley did have a thing for menstrual blood; the quotation I use is from a recipe for what Crowley called “cakes of light,” and, as mentioned in the introduction, when I participated in a Gnostic Mass many years ago I was required to ingest a communion wafer speckled with the “best blood.”
48.Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 241.
SEVEN: NEW YORK’S A LONELY TOWN WHEN YOU’RE THE ONLY THELEMITE AROUND
1.Crowley, The Magical Record, 5.
2.Babalon is another name for the Scarlet Woman. Crowley spelled it in this way so that it would meet his Kabbalistic requirements.
3.Crowley, The Magical Record, 6.
4.Ibid., 7–15. Crowley’s sex diary often gives the impression that he suffered from an addiction. He speaks of “looking for a soul-mate, a destined bride, an affinity, a counterpartal ego, etc., and should have considered the conditions satisfied by any orifice into which I might plunge my penis at a cost not exceeding $2.50.” (Ibid., 11–12).
5.Ibid., 11, 15.
6.On March 4, 1915, for example, Crowley performed an opus aimed at having “All my New Yo
rk debts paid within a week,” and used a peculiar mantra, “Amnydpwaw,” made up of the first letter of each word, for this purpose. He most likely learned this technique from Austin Osman Spare, who developed it. Typically, Crowley does not credit Spare. Ibid., 19.
7.Ibid., 5.
8.Ibid., 26.
9.http://www.cornelius93.com/grady-warriortroubadour.html.
10.Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 148.
11.Crowley, The Confessions, 798.
12.Crowley, The Magical Record, 137.