by Colin Wilson
Acolytes of The Golden Dawn.
CHAPTER 29
Aleister Crowley
Like MacGregor Mathers (see chapter on the Golden Dawn) Aleister Crowley was the possessor of a very considerable ego. His first love was literature—‘a strange coincidence’, he once remarked, ‘that one small county should have given England her two greatest poets—for one must not forget Shakespeare’. But in spite of the tongue-in-cheek self-aggrandisement, he knew that he would never be a poet of the first rank. Magic was a second-best. Yet precisely because he was driven by a compulsive desire to be recognised, he became a very considerable ‘magician’.
Edward Alexander Crowley was born on October 12, 1875, in Leamington, Warwickshire, the son of a retired brewer who had become a devoted member of the Plymouth Brethren. Crowley had the temperament of a spoilt brat, and joyless religious background in his home increased his natural rebelliousness. Yet he enormously admired his father, whose death when Crowley was eleven increased his natural wildness. A highly religious uncle deepened his Swinburnian hatred of Christianity, and he took pleasure in smoking in the lavatory; he also seduced—or allowed himself to be seduced by—a maidservant on his mother’s bed, while his mother was at church. For Crowley, sex was always a symbol of delicious wickedness. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he wrote poetry—which he published at his own expense—and a sadistic pornographic novel in the manner of Sade.
Crowley carried with him all his life a schoolboyish desire to ‘shock the bourgeoisie’.
Mathers’ translation of three books of the Zohar, The Kabbalah Unveiled, excited him, as did a work on ceremonial magic by A. E. Waite. In a hotel room in Stockholm he ‘was awakened to the knowledge that I possessed a magical means of becoming conscious and of satisfying a part of my nature which had up to that moment concealed itself from me’. He wrote to Waite, and in 1898, became a member of the Golden Dawn. The struggle for power was already going on within its leadership, and Crowley took the side of Mathers—although two such self-obsessed characters could not have remained allies indefinitely. In the following year, Crowley (who was a wealthy young man) rented a house at Boleskin, on the shore of Loch Ness, and proceeded to practise the magic of Abramelin the Mage—the first aim of which is to establish contact with one’s ‘Holy Guardian Angel’. Crowley claims that the house filled with shadowy shapes, and that the lodgekeeper went mad and tried to kill his wife. This may well be true; attempts to ‘summon’ spirits are quite likely to succeed, although the results may be thoroughly unpredictable, like inviting a crowd of juvenile delinquents into your home.
During the next few years Crowley did a great deal of globe-trotting, practising magic in various hotel rooms on his travels—and spending a large part of his private fortune. Back in England, he married the sister of the painter Gerald Kelly, a highly neurotic and unstable girl named Rose, who then joined him in his globe-trotting. In Cairo, Rose showed signs of being a medium, and Crowley finally achieved contact with his guardian angel, who was called Aiwass, and at his dictation, took down a work called The Book of the Law, which Crowley regarded as an immense revelation. The book bears the marks of having originated in Crowley’s own unconscious mind; it is full of a hedonism reminiscent of Wilde, and an anti-moralism that sounds like Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’. Like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Crowley seemed to feel that if God does not exist, then man must become God, and must prove it by doing whatever he wants to. The principle led him into a great deal of trouble during his lifetime.
In Paris in 1904 Crowley wrote to Mathers declaring that the ‘Secret Chiefs’ (with whom Mathers claimed to be in touch) had appointed him head of the Golden Dawn. Mathers ignored the letter and the men became enemies. But when Crowley began publishing various secret rituals of the Golden Dawn in a periodical work called The Equinox, Mathers obtained a legal injunction to restrain him. Back at Boleskin, Crowley claims that Mathers launched a magical attack on him, killing most of the dogs and making the servants ill. He retaliated with talismans from Abramelin the Mage, invoking Beelzebub and his forty-nine servitors. (‘I may mention: Nimorup, a stunted dwarf with large head and ears. His lips are greeny bronze and slobbery. Nominon, a large red spongey jelly-fish with one greenish luminous spot like a nasty mess. Holastri, an enormous pink bug..’) Because of Mathers, a workman ‘became maniacal’ and attacked Rose. But ‘as soon as Beelzebub got on the job, the magical assaults ceased ...’
In 1912, a German magical order called the Ordo Templis Orientis accused Crowley of giving away one of their basic secrets—that sex could be used for magical purposes; they ended by authorising Crowley to form his own English branch of the Order, and Crowley’s later magical diaries show that he practised sexual magic assiduously, using both male and female disciples in the ‘operations’.
During the first world war, Crowley went to America and disseminated anti-British propaganda. It was a period of poverty and humiliation. In fact, the remainder of Crowley’s life was a struggle to maintain himself in the style to which he had become accustomed (he had no compunction about living off friends or mistresses for as long as they would put up with it). After the war, he used a legacy of £3,000 to buy a farmhouse in Cefalù, which he renamed The Abbey of Theleme (thelema being a reference to Rabelais’s ‘Do what you will..’) and ran a kind of magical ashram there, with bowls of cocaine out on the tables so guests could take a pinch at will. (Crowley was convinced that he was strong-minded enough to enjoy cocaine without becoming an addict, but proved to be mistaken—by the end of his life, his daily dose of drugs would have killed several normal men.) He had a number of mistresses, the current favourite always being known as the Scarlet Woman, and went out of his way to seduce any women who came to stay. His magical journal has entries like this: ‘Marie Maddingley, respectable married woman..the girl is very weak, feminine, easily excitable and very keen, it being the first time she has committed adultery. Operation highly orgiastic, and elixir [i.e. sperm obtained in this way] of first rate quality ...’ You can almost hear Crowley rolling the word ‘adultery’ round his mouth. This adolescent obsession with ‘wickedness’ remained with him all his life, a legacy of his puritanical upbringing.
In 1923, a scandal made the Italian government order him out of Cefalù—a disciple named Loveday died after being made to drink the blood of a cat Crowley had ‘sacrificed’.
Crowley died in 1947, but the last twenty years of his life were something of an anticlimax. He thoroughly enjoyed all the publicity about being ‘the wickedest man in the world’—outcome of the Cefalù scandal—it was ‘fame at last’—but it did him little practical good, making him widely disliked and misunderstood. He wrote an immense autobiography, the Confessions—which he typically referred to as the ‘autohag’—a hagiography being the life of a saint—and two interesting novels, Moonchild and Confessions of a Drug Fiend (the catchpenny title indicating how urgently he needed money). He even plotted with a friend, Nina Hamnett, to sue her for a ‘libel’ in her autobiography Laughing Torso, to extort money (which they would share) from her publisher; it rebounded against him when the defence described Crowley’s magical activities and the judge found against him.
John Symonds, who knew Crowley in his last years—when he was drug addict living in Hastings—describes him in a book called The Magic of Aleister Crowley, and Crowley emerges as a mild, harmless, rather pathetic old gentleman, a ‘decadent’ who had long outlived his period. He died in 1947, and there was a scandal when his Hymn to Pan was read at the funeral service.
Yet anyone who turns with exasperation from John Symonds’ account of Crowley (in The Great Beast) to his magical writings will discover that here was a mind of considerable power. He is, unfortunately, always capable of silliness—usually when carried away by a desire to get his own back on someone—yet his writings on magic, the Kabbalah, the Tarot, and other esoteric matters, are very remarkable indeed. Many modern students of
the hermetic arts regard Magick in Theory and Practice as one of the two cornerstones of modern magical theory, the other being Dion Fortune’s book The Mystical Qabalah. (One practising magician tells me that the book should be used with care as it is ‘booby trapped’—Crowley always had a sadistic sense of humour.) Israel Regardie’s books about Crowley (like The Eye in the Triangle) should also be read by those who want to understand what was best and most serious about Crowley.
A volume made up of his letters to a female correspondent, Magick Without Tears, is an excellent introduction to the best and worst of Crowley.
Crowley undoubtedly possessed strange powers. His definition of magic was ‘the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will’. Because of his overdeveloped ego, his ‘magical will’ was formidable. In Cefalù, he was able to order a cat to ‘freeze’ and remain in the same place for hours before sacrificing it. He demonstrated his powers in a New York street by falling into step behind a man, then suddenly buckling at the knees—causing the man to collapse on the pavement. Oliver Wilkinson has described how Crowley ‘bewitched’ two men, causing one to lose consciousness, the other to drop on all fours and behave like a dog.2 This kind of ‘magic’ obviously has much in common with the curious feats of Wolf Messing.
2 See my Mysteries, P. 489.
CHAPTER 30
Gerald Gardner and The Modern Witchcraft Revival
Like Crowley, Gerald Gardner—the man most responsible for the modern witchcraft revival—was a man whose personal character will hardly stand close analysis.
Born in June, 1884, he was an asthmatic child whose upbringing was left largely in the hands of an Irish nanny whose spankings gave him a lifelong taste for being flogged. His father was a wealthy but eccentric timber merchant who would remove all his clothes at the slightest sign of rain and sit in it until it stopped. Gardner travelled a great deal in childhood and youth, particularly in the Canaries and North Africa, and developed an obsession with knives, probably connected with his sado-masochism. He followed a number of professions—among them rubber planter and customs officer and when he retired to England at the age of 52, in 1936, took up nudism and became a member of the Folk Lore Society. He was also interested in spiritualism.
He achieved fame quite suddenly at the age of seventy with the publication, in 1954, of Witchcraft Today, which ‘revealed’ that witchcraft covens were still flourishing all over the place. (Theda Kenyon had said as much in Witches Still Live as long ago as 1931, but no one had paid much attention.) An introduction by Professor Margaret Murray lent it a certain respectability—although by this period, she herself was under attack for her views on the ‘Old Religion’ and its continuance down the ages. Gardner supported her theory, and insisted that witchcraft, as widely practised today, is merely a harmless fertility religion whose purpose is to make the earth fruitful. What excited the journalists, and earned Gardner the title ‘king of the witches’, was his admission that he was a member of a coven, and the hints that soon followed that these covens practised sexual rites, including ritual flagellation (inevitably), the fivefold kiss (when the High Priestess kisses the Priest on the lips, breast and genitals) and the Great Rite when the Priest and Priestess copulate before the coven.
Gardner died ten years later, not long before his eightieth birthday, on a ship bound for North Africa, and a witchcraft museum he owned at Castletown on the Isle of Man was taken over by a witch named Monique Wilson, together with her husband. (It had been founded originally by Cecil Williamson, who subsequently founded another at Boscastle in Cornwall).
Like Mathers and Crowley, Gardner was something of a fantasist; he sometimes wore a kilt, and claimed to trace his ancestry back to an aristocratic ancestor named Simon Le Gardinor in 1379. In The Authors and Writers Who’s Who of 1963 he is described as ‘Ph.D’ and ‘D.Litt’, and to have been privately educated; in fact, he told his biographer, Jack L. Bracelin, that he taught himself to read from issues of the Strand Magazine while travelling, and he certainly never attended a university. (The membership list of the Folk Lore Society also mentions an M.A.) A paper he read to the Folk Lore Society on the development of Manx fishing craft was lifted without acknowledgement from earlier published papers.
The journalist Frank Smyth, who has written about Gardner, admits that he has no idea of whether Gardner invented the modern witch cult, or only revealed its existence. With the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in England in 1951, witchcraft finally ceased to be illegal. (It had still been used occasionally in the 20th century to prosecute mediums suspected of fraud.) There is little recent evidence of witch covens in England before Gardner. But within five years of the publication of Witchcraft Today, there were dozens, and by the mid-1960s, there were probably hundreds spread across England and America—pictures of naked men and women trooping around in circles or performing rituals with swords can be found in every illustrated book on witchcraft of the past quarter of a century.
Gardner insists that witches should be regarded as modem descendants of the Druids. ‘Is it possible for witches to do people harm?’ he asks, and answers: ‘I can only say that I have not known them try. I know no spells to this end ...’ This is being disingenuous. If—as he insists—witches possess healing powers, then it seems logical that these powers could be used to do the opposite. In Witches Still Live, Theda Kenyon—who is also anxious to insist that most witchcraft is ‘white’—nevertheless mentions the case of an Aberdeen witch who was always consulted when children or cattle fell ill, and had never been known to do harm, lost her temper with a man who threw her off his land and then put a spell on his five children—adding quickly: ‘It is notable that this evil spell was in the nature of a reprisal—not the opening of hostilities’. T. C. Lethbridge, one of the most eminent of modern writers on paranormal subjects, had no doubt about the harmfulness of black magic; when his neighbour—a Devon witch—told him that she proposed to put a spell on a neighbouring farmer with whom she was quarrelling, he warned her that it could bounce back. In fact, the cattle of two other nearby farmers became ill, and the ‘witch’ died under curious circumstances that looked like murder. In the encyclopedia Man, Myth and Magic, a photographer named Serge Kordeiv described how he became a member of a Gardneresque coven, and how his luck changed abruptly for the better soon after he joined, then became appalling after he decided to leave.
A journalist friend, Colin Cross, told me of a similar experience. He had interviewed a well-known British witch for a colour supplement article, and had made some sarcastic comment about the money she made by selling love potions; the witch told him she had cursed him. For the next six months, he claims, his luck changed abruptly for the worse, and everything that could go wrong did.
Crowley or Mathers would have found the whole question naive. For them, magic meant making use of certain natural forces through the discipline of the will; therefore, it could be used to curse as easily as to heal or bless.
Modern witch at her altar with her ritual tools.
CHAPTER 31
The Death of Jayne Mansfield
On the evening of July 29, 1967, a middle aged man suddenly collapsed on the floor of his San Francisco apartment; and as his wife and son bent over him, a woman’s voice came out of his mouth, screaming: ‘I don’t want to die’. Both claimed they recognised the voice as that of actress Jayne Mansfield, who happened to be a member of the same congregation. They later learned that Jayne Mansfield had died that evening; she had been in a car with her attorney—and lover—when a truck hurtled from under a narrow bridge and crashed into their car; Jayne Mansfield was decapitated.
The ‘congregation’ of which Jayne Mansfield was a member was not a normal Christian church; it was the Church of Satan, run by an ex-police photographer, Anton Szandor LaVey.
Born in 1930, of Hungarian stock, LaVey claims that he decided ‘the Bible was wrong’ when he was twelve. When he left college he worked for a while in a circus as an animal trainer, then
as a ‘magician’ and hypnotist. In the 1960’s LaVey became interested in ritual magic and began holding weekly meetings. On Walpurgis Night, 1966 (April 31), LaVey shaved his head and announced the formation of the Church of Satan.
LaVey has always shown a deft sense of publicity; he achieved wide news coverage when he invited the press to see a marriage performed on an ‘altar’ which consisted of a naked girl. Every room in his house in San Francisco had black or dark red walls, and suitably satanic decorations, such as skulls or his own sinister paintings.
In 1969 LaVey published his own programme for moral—or immoral—reform, called The Satanic Bible. This is not, as might be expected, a litany of blasphemy and abominations, but the kind of book that might have been produced by a collaboration between Nietzche, Swinburne and Aleister Crowley. It argues that the devil is a gentleman, as G. K. Chesterton remarked in a poem (he added ‘and does not keep his word’), and that he is not as black as he is painted. It goes on to glorify strength and sneer at weakness, and to insist that man has allowed himself to be bullied by moralists into denying his healthy impulses. “The Satanist feels: ‘Why not really be honest and if you are going to create a god in your own image, why not create that god as yourself?’ Every man is a god if he chooses to recognise himself as one.” LaVey, like Crowley, seems to be expressing irritation with the Godly rather than with God, and his own form of ‘Do what you will’ seems to stop well short of De Sade’s suggestion that a truly liberated man would enjoy disembowelling pregnant women or raping children. LaVey told one interviewer, Hans Holzer, that the Satanist’s Devil is the Devil that is in every man, that part of his nature that longs for the full satisfaction of wordly pleasures. ‘It had become clear to me’, says Holzer, ‘that LaVey’s Satanism was not exactly what the term meant in the Middle Ages when it was a truly depraved cult’. In fact, LaVey’s Satanism is close to that expressed by William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (‘Energy is eternal delight’), and would have appealed deeply to that good-natured old hedonist, Anatole France.