One suspects that Crowley was lonely that Christmas, though a little break in the clouds occurred on New Year’s Day with an invitation to dine that day with Quinn, John Butler Yeats, and Quinn’s friend modernist art critic F. J. Gregg. We know this from a letter Quinn wrote to John Butler Yeats’s son Jack, also a painter, on the last day of 1914. The letter has additional interest in that Quinn gives his concise view of his views of the war and mentions socialist-anarchist trades unionist Larkin, whom Crowley heard speak in London in November 1913.*82
I have been seeing a great deal of your father. He had dinner with me at Christmas. He is coming up tomorrow New Years Day. Gregg is coming up and also Aleister Crowley a “magician” who was over here, and I fear is up against it financially.
My sympathies are with the allies in this war, although I cannot look any Irishman in the face and say that he ought to go out and fight on the side of the allies because England gave them home rule or any other reason like that. I said to Horace Plunkett ten days ago that if Nationalist Irishmen were not enlisting in Ireland in satisfactory numbers it was because of the birds coming home to roost; that the Carsonites were not going out and getting themselves killed but were keeping their skins whole to renew the fight and treason when the war was over. I feel, and well informed men agree with me that the man most responsible for this war is Carson.*83 He and the Kaiser had a personal interview within the year. The Kaiser reasoned that England would not fight because her army was honeycombed with treason and that she was split open on the Ulster question and so on. Of course he was wrong.
. . . Larkin is out here too. I hear vaguely of him making fiery speeches before pro-German–Irish audiences. Casement has gone over to Berlin, legally committing treason; actually making it impossible for him to do anything for Ireland in Ireland with the volunteers or anybody either during the war or after the war. I told him that his place was in Ireland.22
Jack’s brother, William Butler Yeats, soon got to hear from his father about John Butler Yeats’s second meeting with Crowley, at Quinn’s New Year’s Day dinner. Old enemy, and arguably rival, of Crowley, W. B. Yeats was none too pleased, offering his father his opinion of Crowley from Stone Cottage, Coleman’s Hatch, Sussex, where he was staying with fellow poet and admirer, Ezra Pound, and Dorothy (née Shakespear), whom Pound had recently married. Yeats’s twice-used word amused naturally suggests its opposite.
I was amused by your description of Crowley. Crowley is not a man I appreciate. I am amused to find that he now praises Mrs MaGregor [sic, Moina Mathers, née Bergson], he slandered her in a very cruel way in one of his books but I suppose Bergson’s sister is now worth considering. I am sorry Quinn has taken up with Crowley.23
Crowley had dedicated Carmen Saeculare to Moina Mathers back in 1900, but Yeats would insist anything generous from Crowley was rooted in low motive. He also omits to mention how Yeats himself was instrumental in attacking “Mrs MaGregor’s” husband and seceding from Mathers’s authority in 1900, despite Mathers having taught him much of the occultism he had been so keen to acquire, regardless of his father’s persistent attempts to drag him away from the subject. Willie would soon offer Quinn his views on Crowley in a less “amused” manner.
. . . Crowley, meanwhile, sought inspiration, and positive action, by regular invocation of Hermes in New York City.
FOURTEEN
Toward the Fatherland
Given the amount of time and energy Crowley put in to invoking Hermes, he must have had great faith in the ritual. An average of three invocations a day (morning, afternoon, late evening), sometimes combined with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram to clear the air of unholy spirits, and occasional recitations of Enochian Calls, were performed from New Year’s until March 10, 1915. On a very few occasions, Crowley smoked opium or sipped morphine, presumably to shut out the ordinary world and enter experimentally into the spirit of things.
The main invocation had been adapted from a ritual given to him by Allan Bennett for its efficacy. It was based on a late antique exorcism ritual, translated by Charles Wycliffe Goodwin, first published in 1852 by the Cambridge Antiquarian Society as Fragment of a Graeco-Egyptian word upon magic: from a papyrus in the British Museum. The original calls, with “barbarous names of evocation,” on “the Headless One” for power to expel an evil spirit. Crowley surmised headless to be a poor Greek translation from an Egyptian original meaning “bornless”—without a beginning—so referred to his recomposed “Liber Israfel sub fugura LXIV” as the “Bornless ritual” whose first quarter begins thus:
The Temple being in darkness, and the Speaker ascended into his place let him begin by a ritual of the Enterer, as followeth.
ו*84 Procul, O procul este profani.†85
Bahlasti! Ompehda!*86
In the name of the Mighty and Terrible One, I proclaim that I have banished the Shells unto their habitations.
I invoke Tahuti [Thoth-Hermes], the Lord of Wisdom and of Utterance, the God that cometh forth from the Veil.
O Thou! Majesty of Godhead! Wisdom-crowned Tahuti! Lord of the Gates of the Universe! Thee, Thee, I invoke.
O Thou of the Ibis Head! Thee, Thee I invoke.
Thou who wieldest the Wand of Double Power! Thee, Thee I invoke!
Thou who bearest in Thy left hand the Rose and Cross of Light and Life: Thee, Thee, I invoke.
Thou, whose head is as an emerald, and Thy nemmes as the night-sky blue! Thee, Thee I invoke.
Thou, whose skin is of flaming orange as though it burned in a furnace! Thee, Thee I invoke.
Behold! I am Yesterday, To-Day, and the Brother of To-Morrow!
I am born again and and again.
Mine is the Unseen Force, whereof the Gods are sprung! Which is as Life unto the Dwellers in the Watch-Towers of the Universe.
The words were not uttered as if addressing an audience, but as first addressing the god, then, spoken as the god. The god’s symbolic form will have been studied, his attributes fully assumed, the meaning realized. Then a prayer to the god is made until the voice of the god “comes through.” In the third part, the magician is identified with the god, and in the fourth the prayer is repeated but as made by the god, expressing the god’s will to be manifest in the magician. The process is one of progressive exaltation, until the will of the magician and the god become indistinguishable.1
Rex de Arte Regia for January 5 gives us more detail of what Crowley was doing in his temple; that is, in his mind. He followed the invocation with “dharana” meditation on the caducaeus. He imagined its winged globe inside his skull with its staff in his spine. Dharana meant concentrating on the image without breaks of attention, until the mind was aware of nothing but the image. He did this almost to the point of dhyana, a high trance in which insight into a state beyond subject and object was experienced, usually as a visionary shock. Crowley writes, “I got a dhyana by the way, a spark of silver (left by Hermes, on whose image I was concentrating ere I slept) of extreme brilliance.” He had temporarily become a spark of Hermetic silver. This should have impelled a personal transformation, but the magick did not seem to be working. He recalled in his Confessions:
I was even unable to practise my personal Magick. An inscrutable paralysis had me by the spine. . . . I found myself forced to a daily invocation of Mercury (the god corresponding to the Grade of Magus) with whom I did not consciously want to have any dealings. . . . The surprise of the situation can only be understood if it be remembered that during my whole life I had never failed to attract eager attention wherever I went, to bring off whatever I planned, and to feel myself in every way a centre of electric energy.2
As well as dharana on the caducaeus, Crowley devoted January 5 to Opus XXI with Grace Harris for “sex attraction,” mindful that his last operation three days earlier with Lea Dewey for “gift of Oratory” had failed. At an engagement on January 3 his oratory had been “rotten.” Unexpectedly asked to address a club the following day he “got through creditably,” and
on the 5th was asked to recite at a reception. Crowley couldn’t understand why his magick was so ineffective. Was it in the stars? Would it improve when Jupiter got clear of Uranus? Or was it the women? “Some of the Operations are like those of the spring in England. This country has no sex-force to draw on,” observed Crowley on January 5, noting after the operation with Grace Harris, its lack of “that mutual attraction which makes Energized Enthusiasm possible. . . . Women in America seem purely animal. They ‘come like water and like the wind they go.’ Not one of these Operations in this country has had the flavor that one gets all the time in Europe. I feel inclined to throw the whole thing down and stick to Babalon until I succeed in incarnating Her.”
He did a geomancy using random dots to fathom the reason for failure at the IX° and what he might do to improve things. “The answer is roughly this: that I lack friends and money, and the consequent élan.” Finding wisdom in Matthew 3:12, “To him that hath it shall be given,” he saw the depth of his material problem. “Well I admit I’m tired of going about New York with less than a pound in my pocket—usually less than a dollar!—and when my money comes I’ve no doubt the IX° will be better. So far, though I have written ‘success,’ I have not had that indubitable and striking success that I call worthy of this Royal Sacerdotal Art.”
Nor was he likely to get much more pecuniary encouragement from John Quinn, who wrote an emphatic letter to Crowley on January 5.
Dear Mr Crowley:
Mr Watson has told me of your call this afternoon.
Please don’t be under any misapprehension as to my buying books off you. I haven’t agreed to buy any books off you. You voluntarily agreed to bring some books over to show me vellum copies, etc. But I haven’t agreed to buy any. These are not times when people are spending much money on books. I might care to buy one or two, but at present I don’t care to buy any and I have no present intention of buying any. If I buy one or two manuscripts, for which I have already paid you in advance $500; that is all I can spare now. I haven’t any money to spare for extra copies of books. I never promised to buy any books off you. You said you had some vellum books and that you were going to bring them over for the purpose of cataloguing and possibly of sale. I presume you meant sale to whom it might concern. But certainly I didn’t agree to buy all the books you were bringing over or any part of them or any one of them. The same thing applies to the manuscripts. If times were different, I might feel differently. But I want you clearly to understand that you mustn’t look to me for any considerable quantity of money in addition to the $500 that I have already advanced you on account of the manuscripts. It is well to have things definitely put down, and Mr. Watson’s statement to me of what you said to him this afternoon is the first intimation that I had that you were counting upon any further money from me, which you must not do.
Yours very truly,
John Quinn3
Cut to the quick, Crowley replied by return of post—twice—denying any thought Quinn may have had that he, Crowley, was trying to take advantage of him, or was guilty of any low or mean act in Quinn’s regard, and please, could Quinn take back any ill thought of him.
Quinn replied to Crowley on January 8 with a seven-page letter, of which the following extracts tell us most as to Quinn’s perception of events.
I can dismiss your first letter of the 6th by stating that the four phrases in it “trying to take advantage of you,” “any low or mean act,” “and explain yourself,” and “take back any ill thought I may have had of you” have no reference to my feeling or to the facts of the case. Evidently there was a misunderstanding. I neither said nor did anything to indicate that you were “trying to take advantage of me” or that you had “stooped to any low or mean act.” Nor did I say anything that would require you “to explain yourself.” Nor have I any “ill thought of you.”
So much for your first letter of the 6th.
I received last night your second letter of the 6th.
My recollection is that neither the matter of manuscripts nor of de luxe editions was mentioned during the time of your breakfast with me, but that after breakfast in the sidewalk in front of my apartment as I was turning to the right to go to the Subway and as you were going to walk downtown the subject of manuscripts chanced to come up, and that I told you I might be interested in one or two of your manuscripts. You said that you thought of sending for them. At the same time you said that you had a lot of vellum copies of some or all of your works and that you thought you “might send for the whole lot”; that you intended to have a bibliography made of them here, and that there was not much chance of disposing of them on the other side. You also said you had a considerable stock of books in which you had a large sum of money invested. I said that I hoped you might be able to make some arrangement with some publisher here to deal with them and that I might be interested in looking at some of the vellum copies and that I might possibly be interested in buying a few of them.
I never said that I would “take them all.”
The fact that I have paid £1,200 for a picture has nothing to do with my offering to take a lot of vellum copies en bloc. . . . I never in my life have ever bought anything “offhand,” as you say, or without asking the price or condition. [Quinn gives his conditions when assessing possible purchases] . . . If you said “You know it is a large matter—over two hundred items,” of which I have no recollection, it was a purely voluntary thing on your part with reference to bringing over your books. . . . Then you volunteered, without being asked by me, “to bring over all your books.” [Quinn thought AC would get them to a dealer.] For at your suggestion I had sent the Rodin and the three other books to Mr. Birnbaum with a view of his trying to get a purchaser for them. And when they were returned to me the other day by Mr. Birnbaum, he said that he had tried to get purchasers for them and had failed.
According to your letter, the books were discussed first “and then you mentioned the MSS.” My recollection is quite the other way . . .
The $500 advance was solely with reference to the manuscripts and had nothing to do with the books. The night you remained after the dinner, when my other friends had left, you discussed only the manuscripts. You did not say then, what you now write, that you “stayed in New York solely on account of this transaction.” I cannot see under what possible theory you could have stayed in New York on account of the transaction [my italics]. When I agreed to advance you the $500 on account of the manuscripts I told you that “money was money these times” and that I was limiting my purchases very strictly these days. You had taken your apartment previously to that evening, and told me that one of the reasons why you wanted $500 was to pay your rent at the hotel [the Wolcott], so you could leave there. Besides, you had told me previously to that you had engaged a secretary.
It is perfectly true that I gave you the name of a bank. But I did not “introduce you to a bank.” I told you of the Harriman Bank and said that with our banks it was customary to ask for a minimum average deposit before the bank would bother with the account. You said that you wanted to check all of the $500 out but that you expected some more money soon. You never said that you expected that money from me. I suggested that you explain to the Bank that while you were drawing the whole initial deposit out, you would ultimately keep a fair average balance. But I never said I would be responsible for that balance or that money from me would make up the balance, or anything remotely resembling that. . . .
It is perfectly true that you called up Mr. Watson in regard to the books, but that was because you told me you did not know the customs regulations. Surely a matter of courtesy on the part of Mr. Watson and myself in advising you on this subject is no reason why I should be committed to you on a purchase that I never agreed to make. . . .
As I think I have told you several times, I am an exceedingly busy man, and if the tone of my letters was either irritating or lacking in amenities, it was not intended. But I did and do want to make my position perfectly clear.
You do not “owe me $528.” That money I advanced to you on account of the purchase of two or three manuscripts. . . .
I have said nothing in my letters derogatory to your “reputation.” . . . [Quinn adds that he might still be interested in a book or two, depending on price.]
Thanks for sending me the missing Birthday card of 1903. I don’t know whether its price was included in the purchase price of the original collection or not. If it wasn’t, I shall be very glad to compensate you. . . . There are some of your things vellum copies of which I can imagine I should like to have; others that I should not care for at all.
Yours very truly,
John Quinn4
The day Quinn wrote the above letter, the sun did shine, briefly, on Crowley’s declining fortunes. According to his “Colloquy with Thoth,” January 8, 1915, brought him “luck”: “S.K. bought books to $100, and actually paid for them!” A swish address and phone number—170 West 72nd Street; telephone Columbus 4572—accompanied S.K.’s timely purchase. 170 West 72nd Street was the address of the “Piccadilly Tea Rooms,” which specialized in British food and was perhaps a meeting place for “S.K.” The telephone number, however, does not match the directory address. It may have referred to an apartment above the restaurant, or a payphone.
West 72nd Street began its residential existence with the famous Dakota Building on Central Park West, which when Crowley had first seen it in 1900, loomed almost alone above the park. Around 1915 to 1916 fine stone-faced apartments were added to existing stock to line the street almost to the Hudson River. As for “S. K.”, who paid for $100 worth of Crowley’s books, her identity is still a mystery. She may have been a friend of one of Crowley’s more remarkable and famous lovers, millionairess Aimée Gouraud (also known as Aimée Crocker, 1864–1941). Much attracted to Crowley, Aimée called “of her own accord” on January 2 and became increasingly involved with him, though it also appears to have been a case of renewing past acquaintance.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 28