He then, point by point, accounted for his contact with, and attempt to manipulate his situation with Viereck. His “violent articles” were
a) to discredit the German cause by committing the enemy to manifest absurdities and infamies,
b) to induce the Germans to give me their full confidence,
c) to rouse the indignation of the Americans,
d) to warn England of certain of her own weaknesses by exposing them, i.e., show the enemy’s cards (note in particular articles on the submarine, forecasting both the improvements in the U-boat, and the ruthless campaign).8
Crowley trusted that it would now be perfectly clear that his motivation throughout had been “to serve my country.” Though Everard Feilding had approved of his idea to subvert the Fatherland, “My method may have been mistaken; if so, I am willing to accept rebuke or punishment. I am perfectly ready to do my utmost in the future as in the past to serve England.”9 A list of his twenty-seven propaganda articles followed, with the essential intention of each briefly stated. A “Memorandum” then summarized his activities, beginning with, “I, Aleister Crowley, am of Breton-Irish family, settled in England since 1500. I am a life member of Trinity College, Cambridge.” Of his trip west in 1915 he wrote, “I also took a tour round the coast all through the West, and persuaded him [Viereck] that nobody there cared about the war, except the Germans, who were ready for civil war at need. The idea in all this was to encourage Germany to brave the U.S.A. and so force the breaking-off of relations.” Regarding the “Delenda est Britannia” article of January 3, “I learnt informally that this article had the greatest possible weight with von Bernstorff, persuading him that the general sentiment was such that he could advise his government to take the next suicidal step. The result is history.”10
Crowley then addressed the issue of what had apparently occurred in London.
Apparently the Government at home have not all this information. I am head of a mystical society, the O.T.O., with branches in every colony, and a social scheme which I believe to be the only alternative to Socialism. In politics, by the way, I am of the old school of Pitt, Palmerston, or Disraeli.
Early this year my representatives in London and Edinburgh were approached by the authorities. I have no details, but a letter [from Cowie] of March 8*134 says: “It was only on Saturday last that I learned . . .”
I decline to be represented as a fugitive, without some pretty good reason. Hence I approach you.11
Crowley then made an application for further intelligence work, emphasizing his continued usefulness.
My position is particularly good at this moment. I can pose as a martyr for Trewth†135 [sic] better than ever before. If therefore the British Government can use me, let it do so. If not, I can at least repair the mischief done, whatever that may be; at least I suppose so. Whatever it is, it can only be something that rests on my supposed attitude, and disclosure would presumably undo it.
In the last resort, I shall go to Canada, and claim what is surely the first right of every subject, to be tried for treason. I cannot allow the imputation to rest upon me that I am a traitor or a coward or both, unless I am under the direct orders of the Government, and so certain to be exculpated one day. I never forget that I am the only English poet now alive; the conclusion is something obvious.
Shoot.12
Crowley’s problems with British authorities dragged on. “The secret service people, while considering my application for employment, asked a friend of mine to explain my attitude. ‘We don’t understand him,’ they wailed piteously; ‘we don’t understand him at all.’ ‘Cheer up,’ said my friend; ‘you’re not the first people to fail to understand Mr. Aleister Crowley!’”13 If I were to hazard a guess on who that friend might have been, I should advance the name of Ambrose Raynes, whom William Breeze considers a likely intelligence agent or asset working in Washington and New York. His name appears in a one-page list of Crowley’s useful New York phone numbers of 1917 (“Raynes—Chelsea 2265”14). By 1918, Raynes was Master of Adelphic lodge No. 348, New York, a regular “recognized” Masonic lodge with ties to the Metropolitan College of the Societas Rosicruciana in America. Crowley’s acquaintance, S.R.I.A. founder George Winslow Plummer (1876–1944), was one of Raynes’s close friends.15 The Chelsea exchange served the area around West 23rd Street, Midtown Manhattan, a fairly short distance from where Crowley now rested his fatigued and ailing head.
Leon Engers had come to the rescue. Parking himself and his paints in a rudely furnished old garret at a rundown 164 5th Avenue, just south of Madison Park (the Empire State Building was unheard of), Engers kindly offered basic appurtenances for the Beast’s use.*136 Conditions were rough by Crowley’s standards—the place was decaying and had no running water—but he never forgot Engers’s kindness. Dossing on a sofa, Crowley’s ordeal intensified, and he remembered the period of spring 1917 as “inexpressibly distressing.”16 His health broke down, not surprisingly given all the pressure and financial worry, and it was not only physical. He also felt spiritually devoid of ambition or energy; he drifted through long, featureless days, hardly eating. On consideration, he wondered if the reaction hadn’t simply kicked in from his extraordinary mega-turn-on of adrenalin that followed his taking of the “elixir of youth” the previous summer. It certainly wasn’t “eternal youth”; the price was high.
Engers’s own behavior did little to encourage the Beast, for while Engers had an ample allowance from his family, he was always in debt, and the next installment was spent in advance. Crowley said Engers had never grown up, which should have given them much in common. Engers lived the life of the garret artist, something Crowley would one day himself emulate by necessity. Engers cadged a dollar here and a dollar there—that was one thing, but one incident stuck in Crowley’s craw. The studio janitor was a crippled youth with a large family. Engers went virtually to his knees, imploring the pathetic-eyed fellow to lend him two dollars, and he, a millionaire’s son! Crowley made it his business to put some moral spine in Engers, pushing him into getting on with painting and realizing his ideals instead of wasting his time. In due course, Crowley promoted him, organized an exhibition and reviews, and basically launched him. Engers, for his part, made several portraits of Crowley, one a “psychochrome” that took his spiritual aura into the visual plane, and another complete portrait that today hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery.
Despite Crowley’s judgment of Engers’s moral weaknesses, he wrote how Engers’s decency toward him personally transformed the crude environment and its pecuniary poverty into a “paradise,” such was the spiritual effect of kindness on a Beast who never expected very much from anyone.
One friendship that began to bloom in the darkest days of 1917 was that enjoyed with Louis Umfreville Wilkinson, born rebel and suave intellectual, to whom Crowley wrote at 13 East 43rd Street on April 20.
My dear Dumfreville*137 [sic.]
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Not materialist, dear bundle of sticks, but Buddhist; soon to Nibbana’s stainless peace shall come that whose complexities, realized as mere chance combinations, consent to dissolution.
. . . Dreiser†138 will bring his “sisters”—not his, apparently, but each other’s. We can hardly start it before 4 o’ the clock; we shall catch the physiological cycle on its upward-moving run; and we shall give lunch time to pass on . . . concerning its psychological state. I would have helped you to a further and higher analysis. . . . You shall see (the Gods grant it!) that Atman [soul] is Anatta [no-soul], and Anatta Atman, in the Tao. Hast read my ‘Book of Lies’? Nay? Then I’ll send it Wednesday—and you shall have your hands upon the testicles of Dragon Truth.
Love is the law, love under will.
à toi
A.C.17
On April 22, with nothing going on to record in his diary but his dreams, and suffering from doubt, “Events have been terrible—hopeless,” he entered a meditation that led him to the idea of
Mercury as a healer. Then he laughed, “But I am Mercury,” at which he felt a kind of stab to the solar plexus, and realized . . . Mercurius sum (the statement in Latin)—try it in Greek! Even before consciously calculating the Greek gematria of “Ermes eimi,” he got the message; it was 418. 418 was the “Magical Formula of the Aeon.”18
Curiously, in the Confessions, Crowley places this minor revelation as a coda to resuming work after the New Orleans “strike,” where it is most effective, for it was so obviously a sign to him, an instant communication of the gods to his soul, as if to say, “Yes, we’re here.”
The Confessions narrative makes the insight a definite communication from the Secret Chiefs leading to a dismissal of doubt and an acceptance of the ordeal’s necessity; he ceases to fret. Placed historically in the garret on 5th Avenue, going through a depression, as he was, it becomes simply another incident, if a momentary respite. Down in the dumps with 5th Avenue blues, he even felt his Holy Guardian Angel was skeptical of his complaints. “You’ve had the vision of the Universal Beauty—and what good has it done to you?” Crowley had no answer. “I must simply go on—down the Precipice!”19
But gradually, Crowley began to get better, though there was one particular blow that even the news of America’s finally entering the war with the Allies on April 6 could not assuage. Eight days after Wilson took the plunge, Crowley’s mother, Emily Bertha, suffered a heart attack at her home in Eastbourne, Sussex. News of her death reached Crowley on May 6, two nights after he had dreamed of it with a feeling of extreme distress. He wrote in his diary that he had often dreamed she had died, “but never with that helpless lonely feeling.”20 Emily left all her money and possessions to her brother Tom Bond Bishop and to members of her mother’s family, the Coles. Her only son was bequeathed an old “Devonport” (sloping writing desk) from the dining room and small cabinet formerly belonging to Lady Berwick.21
Within six months of his mother’s death Crowley began drawing and then painting. His mother had painted. She used to have a painting she’d made of Lawrence and Birdie’s Titusville farm that she hung at home. I rather suspect it was the shock of the loss of his personal “Queen Victoria,” coupled with the experience of living closely to a painter, that launched Crowley on his fascinating career as a (mostly) part-time visual artist, a career explored in my book The Beast in Berlin.
A rare letter of this dark night of the soul survives dated May 10, written to Louis Wilkinson, who cared enough to keep his correspondence. The handwriting of the original was, most unusually for Crowley, very poor: a clear indication of physical weakness, and perhaps some disorientation, though the humor is characteristically vigorous.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
So you have not forgotten your function as Comforter. Tis the chief of pleasures to hear of any one getting anything.
The danger of taking anything at its face value (or indeed at any value at all) is really a terrible one. The chapter of the Book of Lies “Tennis-work” is indicated, twice daily after visions, in a little alkahest.*139
I enclose the dollar; I shall never have another, in all likelihood. Frame it, labeled accordingly. I want it known however one day that I once did pay some one back.
Conviction grows that that elixir is the right one for you; so keenly await news of new-old preparation.
Love is the law, love under will. το µεγα Θηριον [To mega therion = the great wild beast]22
In the wee small hours of Sunday, May 27, Crowley resorted to magick to see if he could help improve his dismal health. He chose to assist him Mary Lewinstein, a Latino prostitute of 221 West 130th Street (telephone: Morningside 8145). Perhaps the Beast sought something approximating to that “old New Orleans essence” that made Woody Allen put a red light-bulb in his bedside lamp to stir things up with Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, because Mary’s address was bang in the heart of Harlem.*140 “After a long time I am unable to fuck well,” wailed Crowley, who had now been ill since mid-March. The operation was bad from practically every conceivable angle, and yet it apparently got his health to turn the corner, at last.23 What is particularly strange is that his “Magus” diary (The Urn) records the reflections, apparently of his Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass, made shortly after the operation.
My health has been constantly bad—a mixture of swamp fever and rheumatism, fugitive neuralgic symptoms, etc.—at least I most sincerely hope so, i.e. from A.C.’s point of view. But I myself איואס [“Aiwass” written in Hebrew] have been considering all the time how to act as to Crowley’s body and mind. Can I use it any more?
Wouldn’t my ideas get ahead much faster if he were dead?
Shouldn’t I be wise to manifest in another, or in a multitude?
This practice has been nightly for some few days—I dare say ten. It has helped greatly my poor client Crowley, who now sees the point of the Buddhist corpse-meditations and their congeners.24
Crowley seems to have been half expecting to die, with Aiwass almost gloating on the wretched instrument. A few weeks later, Crowley’s becoming-a-Magus diary records another remark suggesting a degree of mental disassociation, a removal of consciousness from his mundane, poorly self (“AC” or “Crowley”) into an extradimensional Self, or “Unconscious” Self attaining consciousness in the instrumental ego. Indeed, Crowley (or is it Aiwass?) makes this unusual condition of mind(s) account for the confusion about him experienced, presumably, by persons concerned with his essential loyalties. One would doubt, however, whether his explanation would have helped his case. Had interlocutors ever heard the following reasoning, the natural conclusion would have been that he was mad, self-deceiving, or plain deceptive.
I am getting quite to the point of habitual recognition of myself as איואס [Hebrew: Ayvas = Aiwass] and it does much good. But I have seen lately the danger of having a mental machine which functions so independently of the Self, and even of the human will. E.g., all my sympathies are most profoundly with the Allies; but my brain refuses to think as sympathizers seem to do; so in argument I often seem “pro-German.” Similarly, I have a Socialistic or Anarchistic brain, but an Aristocrat’s heart; hence constant muddle not in myself, but in others who observe me.
One catches oneself assuming that A.C. [?] has some importance to something, that this bundle of sticks is worth keeping tied, for example. It is hard to express how deep and subtle this has become; as a matter of fact, my brain constantly baulks at the analysis. “Change” is the special subject of a Magus; and all terms seem to have become entirely fluid. I must confess to moral paralysis, by the way; hope has been practically extinguished, and I now realize how hard it is to work without that insidious drug. One doesn’t want to take a chance any more; the thought of wasting energy has become insuperable; I can only do a thing when I am sure of the result, or very nearly so. My life-work seems to have gone to utter smash at the exact moment when it was to have flowered. And this also pertaineth unto the Grade of a Magus, and I give Salutation to the Prophet of Allah, for like unto his case is mine also.25
A Freudian analyst, unacquainted with the special ordeals of becoming a Magus, might conclude that Crowley was experiencing a kind of “transference,” taking refuge from unbearable feelings in his “superego,” where responsibility has been transferred, and might suspect the patient of being on the verge of a complete mental breakdown. Fortunately, or arguably unfortunately, for Crowley, he had the magical work ethic, and he let magick take the lead in getting him out of the impasse.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The International
Circumstances changed. Crowley attributed it to two factors. First, he calculated that a new Chokmah day (the fourteenth) began on June 9, and in his Confessions makes that mark the period over which the previous wilderness ended when new “officer” Anna Katherine Miller, called the “Dog” after the Egyptian jackal-headed god, Anubis, a helper on his path, arrived.1 The dates however, on analysis, don’t tally up, as the first act of sex magick w
ith the “Dog” did not occur, by his own record, until August 14, and Crowley was seldom backward about coming forward in such matters. As he had recently observed, the fact that men, perceiving women in the first instance as either “chaste” or “unchaste” “proves that cunt is the most significant thing about them.” A personal joke to himself, possibly, but two months is getting on for a whole Chokmah period of seventy-three days.
The other great change he attributed to three operations of the IX°. The first was that with Mary Lewinstein of Harlem on May 27, then two more performed on the twenty-eighth and thirtieth of May, with Anita, “half prostitute, half Japanese, half-Irish.” The latter two had as their Object “the Promulgation of the Law”—of Thelema, of course. In his Rex de Arte Regia diary, Crowley reckoned that these operations resulted directly in his induction as contributing editor of the International, “with its occult matter,”2 “about six weeks later,” which is perhaps stretching it a bit. Crowley reckoned he could expect success from these operations because they were “in actual harmony” with his whole karma—that is Will—and he could safely leave it “to Those invoked forces” to see to the details.3
In fact, a letter I unearthed recently at the Warburg Institute, London, rather suggests that June 1917 was a period of personal crisis and may have been the proper time of composition of the defensive “Affidavit” quoted earlier. Several things point to this. Trouble is evident in a letter Crowley wrote to Louis Wilkinson on Monday, June 25.
Ta [thanks]: I deem I will come Wednesday morning: because I may be withdrawn from circulation at any moment now. The Call of the Wild is heard from Sullivan County, for one thing;*141 I expect to go there Thursday, and (may be) met there.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 52