by Gary Lachman
13.Crowley, The Confessions, 800.
14.Oliver Marlow Wilkinson in Dark Dimensions: A Celebration of the Occult, ed. Colin Wilson (New York: Everett House, 1977), 111–12.
15.Jones would later tutor the novelist Malcolm Lowry in magick. See Gary Lachman, A Dark Muse (New York: Thundersmouth Press, 2005), 253–61.
16.Crowley, The Confessions, 771.
17.Ibid., 805.
18.King, Megatherion, 117–18. See also Symonds, The Great Beast, 236–39.
19.Crowley, The Confessions, 747. It is possible O’Brien never existed and the story about the bus is invented. Crowley could have seen a copy of The Fatherland, saw that Viereck was its editor, and called at his office looking for work.
20.Symonds, The Great Beast, 232.
21.Crowley, The Confessions, 751.
22.Ibid., 752.
23.Ibid., 750.
24.Charles Richard Cammell, Aleister Crowley (London: New English Library, 1969), 76.
25.Crowley, The Confessions, 753.
26.Symonds, The Great Beast, 257–58.
27.In 1998 I attended the exhibition of Crowley’s paintings held at London’s October Gallery; it was the first public exhibition of his work since 1931; http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/exhibitions/1998cro/index.shtml. As with much else in Crowley’s career, his painting has received renewed attention, especially in the academic world. An interesting and stimulating study of his work can be found in Marco Pasi’s article “Aleister Crowley, Painting, and the Works from the Palermo Collection” in Abraxas International Journal of Esoteric Studies Issue 3 (Spring 2013), 65–81.
28.Crowley, The Magical Record, 106.
29.Crowley, The Confessions, 773–74.
30.Crowley, The Magical Record, 35. The Magical Record also shows that while Crowley and Alice, who he called Monkey, were performing opera, his aim in more than one of them was to attract “a perfect girl for the summer.” No new girl turned up, but Crowley considered Alice had been “perfect” herself, “writing wonderful love letters, etc.” Ibid., 35–36.
31.Crowley, The Confessions, 774.
32.Ibid., 810.
33.Ibid.
34.Ibid., 106. This kind of “everything is everything” view had some peculiar exponents, one of whom was Charles Manson, a product of the drug-informed milieu of 1960s San Francisco. See Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 318–29.
35.Ibid., 122.
36.Ibid., 122–23.
37.Ibid., 143.
38.Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe, 290.
39.William James, “On Some Hegelisms,” in Mindscapes: An Anthology of Drug Writings, ed. Antonio Melechi (West Yorkshire: Mono, 1998), 20–21.
40.Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Grafton Books, 1987), 21.
41.Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt.
42.Crowley, The Confessions, 823.
43.Ibid., 857.
44.http://www.oxygenee.com/Crowley-Green-Goddess.pdf.
45.http://hermetic.com/crowley/international/xi/10/cocaine.html and http://lib.oto-usa.org/crowley/essays/ethyl-oxide.html.
46.Crowley, The Magical Record, 51.
47.Ibid., 49.
48.Ibid., 73.
49.See Symonds, The Great Beast, 241–53; and King, Megatherion, 118–23.
50.Crowley, The Confessions, 834–35.
51.Crowley, The Magical Record, 79.
52.Ibid., 80.
53.Ibid.
54.Seabrook was an interesting character. He is known today mostly through his connection with Crowley, but at least two of his books are worth reading: The Magic Island (1929), about voodoo, and Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (1940), in which he writes about Crowley and also Gurdjieff. He suffered from alcoholism, enjoyed sadism, and in 1945 committed suicide.
55.William Seabrook, Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (London: White Lion Publisher, 1972), 190.
56.Wilkinson, Seven Friends 105.
57.Ibid., 114.
58.Ibid.
59.Oliver Marlow Wilkinson, Introduction to Wilkinson, Seven Friends, 13.
60.Crowley, The Magical Record, 82.
61.C. G. Harrison, The Transcendental Universe (London: Temple Lodge, 1993); and Rudolf Steiner, Spiritualism, Madame Blavatsky, and Theosophy (Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press, 2001).
EIGHT: IN AND OUT OF THE ABBEY OF THELEMA
1.Crowley, The Confessions, 848.
2.Crowley, The Magical Record, 94.
3.Ibid., 86.
4.Ibid., 94.
5.Crowley, The Confessions, 856.
6.Crowley, The Magical Record, 97.
7.Crowley, The Confessions, 859.
8.Crowley, The Magical Record, 98.
9.In 1993 I visited Cefalù. Although I knew it was there, I did not seek out Crowley’s abbey, my interest in thelema having long since waned; I was also with my then wife and she did not want to ask the locals the way to the black magician’s house. Like Crowley, I did, though, climb the great rock and visit the temples to Diana and Jupiter and no doubt came within a stone’s throw of the place.
10.Crowley was not the only occult teacher to establish his own community in the 1920s. In 1922 Gurdjieff founded his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, Count Herman Keyserling’s School of Wisdom was founded in Darmstadt in 1920, and by then Rudolf Steiner’s Goetheanum, constructed during World War I, was already going strong.
11.In the 1960s Timothy Leary applied a similar technique, administering high doses of LSD to his followers and subjecting them to a barrage of stimuli, aimed at erasing the “conditioning” bourgeois society had imprinted on them and so freeing them to make, as it were, a fresh start. Leary began his career as a behavioral psychologist and he applied the same methods in his subsequent work. Neither he nor Crowley was particularly successful. See Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind.
12.Symonds, The Great Beast, 282.
13.Again, the similarity with Timothy Leary’s “acid house” in Millbrook, New York, is striking. Reports recount the place being a filthy, disordered mess; evidently the dishes there were as beautiful as the ones Aldous Huxley saw.
14.Do what thou wilt, etc. Even thelemites find this tedious and many resort to a simple “93,” the Kabbalistic numerical value of thelema.
15.Crowley, The Magical Record, 112.
16.Ibid., 115. He misquotes the title of Poe’s story as “Buried Alive.”
17.Ibid.
18.Ibid., 101.
19.Ibid., 105.
20.Ibid., 140.
21.Ibid., 177.
22.Ibid., 177–78.
23.Seabrook, Witchcraft, 198.
24.Crowley, The Magical Record, 234–35. The passage in the Magical Record seems to say that Leah ate it as well and that they kissed afterward.
25.Symonds, The Great Beast, 289.
26.Crowley, The Magical Record, 296.
27.Crowley, The Confessions, 875.
28.Ibid., 876.
29.Quoted in Wilson, Aleister Crowley, 126.
30.Nathalie Blondell, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life (New York: McPherson & Co., 1998), 122.
31.Ibid., 106.
32.Ibid., 105.
33.King, Megatherion, 137.
34.Crowley, The Magical Record, 202.
35.Symonds, The Great Beast, 300.
36.Blondell, Mary Butts, 106.
37.Strangely, the artist and writer Wyndham Lewis, whose similarities with Crowley have been noted by Colin Wilson, also satirized Mary Butts in his novel The Apes of God (New York: McBride), 1932.
38.Blondell, Mary Butts, 118.
39.Symonds, The Great Beast, 298; King, Megatherion, 138.
40.Symonds, The Great Beast, 298.
41.Ibid.
42.The amounts were £93 (the numerical value of thelema) or £418 (the numerical value
of Abrahadabra, the word of Aeon).
43.Oddly, Charles Manson was also known for his wild, frenetic dancing. See Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 324.
44.Booth, A Magick Life, 390.
45.Ibid., 395.
NINE: WANDERING IN THE WASTELAND
1.Prior to his deportation Crowley regarded Mussolini and his Fascismo with “entire sympathy,” and considered the Fascisti patrolling the railway “delightful.” From the perspective of his hotel room in Tunis, however, it was “the beginning of the end for this upstart renegade with his gang of lawless ruffians . . .” (Crowley, The Confessions], 911; Aleister Crowley, The Magical Diaries of To Mega Therion: The Beast 666, ed. Stephen Skinner [St. Helier, Jersey: Spearman, 1979], 16). Crowley’s admiration for fascism was not, evidently, a blind for espionage activity, and he would soon show a similar admiration for Hitler.
2.Crowley, The Magical Diaries, 17.
3.Ibid., 20.
4.Ibid.
5.Ibid., 21.
6.Symonds, The Great Beast, 375.
7.Ibid., 372; Booth, A Magick Life, 407.
8.G. I. Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men (New York: Penguin Compass), 288.
9.Symonds, The Great Beast, 303. In Teachings of Gurdjieff (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1971) C. S. Nott relates meeting Crowley at the Café Select in Montparnasse and that Crowley turned up at the Prieuré a few days later. In this account, Crowley did meet Gurdjieff, who “kept a sharp watch” on the dark magician (121–22). In The Harmonious Circle (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980) James Webb states that Crowley stayed at the Prieuré for an entire weekend, at the end of which Gurdjieff subjected him to an oral beating (314–15). Unfortunately, Webb provides no sources for his account, and Nott’s seems to take place in 1925, not 1924, when Crowley noted down his meeting with Frank Pinder. One suspects that Crowley would have mentioned an actual meeting with Gurdjieff as well as his meeting with Nott. But as far as I can tell, he doesn’t. Then again, Crowley might have judiciously omitted a record of a meeting at the end of which he “crept back to Paris with his tail between his legs” (Ibid.).
10.Ibid., 304.
11.Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 256–57.
12.Symonds, The Great Beast, 380; Booth, A Magick Life, 411. Booth gives the year as 1926.
13.Symonds, The Great Beast, 379.
14.Ibid., 377.
15.Ibid.
16.Ibid., 382.
17.Ninette, too, suffered at this time. She lived penniless at the abbey, and was made pregnant again by a local Sicilian. She tried to leave Cefalù, but having no passport, could not. She remained there until 1927. After living for years solely for her senses—or true will—she feared for her sanity and that her children would be taken from her. After repeated pleas for help, Crowley eventually sent her five hundred francs, but nothing else. She eventually reached France. Crowley tried to adopt his daughter Lulu by her, but this came to naught and she vanished. (Booth, A Magick Life, 412–14.)
18.Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 84.
19.For a moving account of Leah and Mudd’s fate see Symonds, The Great Beast, 372–401, and Booth, A Magick Life, 399–421, from which this brief account is gratefully drawn.
20.Pansophia has a prestigious pedigree, going back to the Rosicrucians. See Lachman, Politics and the Occult, 12–16.
21.Symonds, The Great Beast, 397.
22.For more on Performance, see Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 309–18.
23.Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley, 140.
24.Phil Baker, The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (Sawtry, Cambs: Dedalus Books, 2009), 296.
25.Crowley was rather vain about his photographs, often taking several of the same pose, making sure he got it “just right.” Among the Gerald Yorke collection at the Warburg Institute in London, there is one photograph of Crowley in his Arab sheik persona, among many others, in which, as a friend remarked, he looked “rather normal.” On the back of it Crowley wrote that it was the worst photograph of himself he had ever seen.
26.Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle, 3.
27.Ibid., 6.
28.Above his bed in his Chambre des Cauchemars at Cefalù, Crowley hung a sign that read “Alys Cusack is _ot at home!” He would add an “h” or “n” depending on his mood. Alys was Crowley’s homosexual nom de guerre.
29.Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 95.
30.Ibid., 253.
31.Symonds, The Great Beast, 451.
32.As Paul Newman has pointed out, this makes it highly unlikely that Henry Miller ever met Crowley in Paris, an encounter that has been repeated more than once. In a letter of October 1935 to his friend Emil Schnellock, Miller claims that he met Crowley, who not only explained Jung’s ideas about the anima and animus to him but also loaned him money. This alone should make Miller’s claim suspect; Miller himself was as notorious a debtor as Crowley. Anaïs Nin offers some corroboration in her book Incest; under the heading “November 2nd, 1934,” she states that Miller had “fallen under the spell” of Crowley, who was a painter “gone mad in Zürich.” But Miller only arrived in Paris in 1930, after Crowley was expelled. Paul Newman, The Tregerthen Horror (Abraxas Editions, 2005), 54.
33.Detective, May 1929, Gerald Yorke collection, Warburg Institute School of Advanced Studies, University of London.
34.Booth, A Magick Life, 433.
35.For more on Pessoa and the occult, see Lachman, A Dark Muse, 229–36.
36.Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 358.
37.Ibid.
38.Holmes does this in “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” before he and Professor Moriarty plunge into the Reichenbach Falls.
39.Christopher Isherwood, Diaries, ed. Katherine Bucknell, Vol 1. 1939–1960 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 550.
TEN: THE SUNSET OF CROWLEYANITY
1.Symonds, The Great Beast, 434.
2.Crowley also claimed that he owned £150,000 of property in California. This was based on a claim that H. Spencer Lewis, Imperator of the Ancient Mystical Order of Rosae Crucis—or AMORC, as it is generally known—received its charter from the O.T.O. As Outer Head of the Order, Crowley naturally believed that the extensive property owned by AMORC in San Jose really belonged to him. He wrote to Lewis explaining this, but Lewis’s reply has not survived.
3.He died, age sixty-five, in 2002. Like his father, he was fond of adopting names; he was known at different times as Randall Gair Doherty, Aleister Ataturk, Aleister MacAlpine, and Charles Edward d’Arquires. According to Paul Newman, Ataturk lived for a time with Karl Germer in the United States, then returned to Britain under a cloud—he was deported. He tried his hand at writing, but wasn’t successful, and used his family connections to “gain ascendancy in the mystical ranks.” Like his father, he had big plans that never came to fruition. He lacked staying power and was content to make an impression by dressing up; he also was evicted on more than one occasion for not paying rent. Photographs of him with a shaved head make him look like the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (Newman, The Tregerthen Horror, 204–5).
4.Newman, The Tregerthen Horror, 65.
5.Ibid.
6.For more on Pat Doherty’s children, see Newman, The Tregerthen Horror, 118.
7.Oliver Marlow Wilkinson, in Dark Dimensions: A Celebration of the Occult, ed. Colin Wilson (New York: Everett House, 1977), 111.
8.Newman, The Tregerthen Horror, 80.
9.Ibid., 68–69.
10.Alan Burnett-Rae, “A Memoir of 666,” in Sandy Robertson, The Aleister Crowley Scrapbook (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1994), 23.
11.Ibid.
12.Peter Haining, ed., The Necromancers (London: Coronet, 1972), 29.
13.Baker, The Devil Is a Gentleman, 296, 320.
14.Newman, The Tregerthen Horror, 69.
15.http://hermetic.com/crowley/little-essays-towards-truth/trance.html.
16.
Symonds, The Great Beast, 41–42.
17.The authenticity of Rauschning’s book has been questioned, but this is irrelevant in this context. Whether Hitler really said what Rauschning reports him as saying or not, Crowley believed he did.