Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Herein is wisdom; let him that hath understanding count the number of The Beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred and three score and six.

  But for Crowley the coincidence was too good to be true. The masters had arranged a sign so incalculably vast as to its odds that he could but accept it gracefully and investigate further. Crowley contacted the stranger Jacobs at Bridgeport, Connecticut, and asked him whether he had the gematria of Aiwass, the dictator of The Book of the Law, which Crowley had always taken to be 78 from “Mezla,” the influence of Chokmah (AYVAS). Jacobs, a man who would later say that his middle name meant Satan (!), gave Crowley the gematria of OYVZ, which added to 93, the number of the Greek Thelema (Will) and Agape (love).*170

  I was always intrigued by the detail about Crowley’s coming in to 1123 Broadway to look over mail only to leave on account of the freezing office, so I thought I’d consult the well-respected oracle of truth, the Sun newspaper of Monday, February 25, to connect back to what we take as the real world.

  Things were freezing all right. The main headline read 146 BELIEVED LOST IN WRECK OF NY BOUND LINER NEAR CAPE RACE. The photograph showed the “Steamship Florizel as She Appeared Recently When Breaking Ice in New York Harbour.” The subheading read, “Florizel Strikes Reef During Blinding Snowstorm—All Aboard Regarded as Having Perished.”

  Meanwhile in Ireland: “CRISIS AT HAND ON HOME RULE EVEN if Irish Constitution Is Offered Its Acceptance Carries Dangers.” “ARMY CAPTAIN, GERMAN AGENT, GETS 25 YEARS—Court-martialled Here After Being Brought Back from France.”

  Then there were the announcements of shortages on account of war rationing. A caption at the bottom of the front page read, “This is a Wheatless Day,” next to “Strikes and Revolution Predicted in Germany.” Turn to page 2 to find out about the coal shortages that sent Crowley back home that day: “WILL ALLOT COAL SUPPLY BY APRIL—The first conclusive action of the Fuel Administration in apportioning the nation’s coal among householders and industries for the coming year will be taken next Friday.” Navy and transport needs were paramount.

  Meanwhile, with all of Amalantrah’s recommendations that Crowley head to Egypt to find the egg, it’s interesting to note the ubiquity of Egyptian deities—especially those you could smoke. A large advertisement invited readers to partake of “Egyptian Deities—The Utmost in Cigarettes—Plain end or Cork Tip. People of culture and refinement invariably PREFER Deities to any other cigarette. Twenty-five cents.”

  RATIONING BEGINS IN BRITAIN TODAY. On page 3, a headline indicated that Crowley’s clandestine interest in the I.W.W. was not without foundation. “LETTERS LINK BERKMAN WITH GERMAN SPIES—Emma Goldman Also in Plot of Har Dyal to Foment India Revolution.” “WASHINGTON 24 February—Startling evidence believed by the Department of Justice to be the thread which will lead to unraveling a complicated connection of Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and other leaders of the I.W.W. and kindred organizations in the US with the German spy system in other countries, was made public here today. Two letters written to Berkman by Har Dayal, the founder of the Hindu revolutionary paper Chadr in San Francisco were seized by the Dept. of Justice at the time the offices of the publication Mother Earth were raided. . . . Dayal is now in Berlin and has been there since 1914 working in close connection with the German Foreign Office in trying to organize a Hindu revolution. . . .” The first of the letters containing the evidence against the two anarchists was addressed to Berkman “In care of Mother Earth office, West 125th street, near Sixth Ave NY” and was postmarked “Amsterdam, October 24, 1915.” Correspondents referred to one another as “Comrades.”

  In German American brewing capital, Milwaukee: “MILWAUKEE PUPILS DROPPING GERMAN—The language of the Kaiser and ‘kultur’ has lost its popularity in the grammar schools of Milwaukie. . . .”

  On a lighter note, the wonderful Ethel Barrymore was appearing in “The Smartest and Best Acted Comedy of the Year,” The Off Chance, at the Empire, next to The Cohan Revue 1918, and the Zieg feld New Midnight Frolics atop the New Amsterdam Theater. An advert for “BEVO,” a beverage, made the most of the extreme weather, showing ice around a sign reading “Cold Weather Notice”: “Keep in mind that Bevo . . . will freeze at 32° Fahrenheit—just like any other non-alcoholic beverage. If Bevo were merely a summer beverage this warning might not be so timely.”

  On page 6: “Shop Early for Coal and Build New Bins. Some of the gentlemen that preside over the coal supply are seriously pondering the advisability of urging householders to fill their bins this summer against the chill of next winter.” On page 8: “CLASSES IWW AS BOLSHEVIKI—Ralph M. Easley, chairman of National Civic Federation, attacks the IWW as the counterpart of Bolsheviki in Russia.”

  The Tribune also announced WHEATLESS DAY—ONE MEAL WITHOUT WHEAT. Germany’s Peace Terms were accepted by Russia, with Germany getting half the Ukraine, Livonia, Esthonia, half of Poland and so forth. This was “The Great War—1305th Day. [U.S. Field Marshall] Pershing’s Men Assuming More Important Role.” On page 14: “U.S. Is Urged to Seize Records of German-American Alliance—Philadelphia Branch of German Alliance Denies Disloyalty Charge. Bill to Intern All Enemy Aliens Is Urged on Congress.”

  And the weather report: yesterday highest temperature 52°, lowest 31°. At 6:00 a.m.

  That’s the news, folks! Now who was Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs?

  Fig. 30.1. Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs (ca. 1891–1971)

  Shmuel bar Aiwaz bie Yackou de Sherabad (ca. 1891–1971) was as striking a personage as his name suggests. His New York Times obituary tells us that he “was born in Persia, came to the United States as a youth, and in 1909 became a printer for the Persian Courier, a weekly here. Later he worked for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, designing and revising unusual type faces. In the early 1930s he founded the Golden Eagle Press.”9

  His origins appear vague. The 14th U.S. Census of 1920 shows a “Samual Jacobe,” aged twenty-nine, who migrated to the States in the 1900s from Persia. Described as an “Assyrian,” Jacobs wrote a book, Information for Assyrians Desiring to Become American Citizens, of which only one copy survives in the Library of Congress. He became a naturalized American in 1917 and then worked as a “linotyper.”10

  The name “Assyrian” is given to an Aramaic-speaking people indigenous to northern Iraq, geographically close to the biblical “Naharin,” home of Abraham’s family in Genesis. The Kurdish government calls Assyrians “Kurdish Christians”; they are frequently ill-treated. Many of them live in close proximity to the Yezidis, who were first persecuted by Ottoman rulers and now by extremist Muslims. The designation Assyrian also refers to any member of the Assyrian Church of the East, the oldest Christian church in Mesopotamia, founded by Thomas the Apostle; members survive in present-day Persia.

  The Assyrian Church, like the “Chaldaean” Roman Catholic– affiliated Church, used Estrangelo, a Syriac font. According to William Breeze, Jacobs used Syriac Estrangelo to give the Hebrew values for the word Thērion.11 The name “Aiwaz” is not of Syriac origin. Samuel bar Aiwaz wrote that he was of the “house of Yackou”—Jacob—of Sherabad. Curiously, in an illustrated 1929 U.S. interview article, Samuel Jacobs asserted, with a gleeful eye, that his middle name, Aiwaz, meant “Satan.”

  Philosophical eclecticism seems to have been part of the Jacobs heritage. Perhaps Samuel the fine printer recognized something of himself in Crowley, the lover of fine and obscure editions. Crowley refers to him as a “Brother.” There is no record of his being a member of either the O.T.O. or the AA; perhaps he was a Freemason. Crowley intuited a more pro-found relationship between them, a spiritual bond. Such kinship is evident in a fascinating interview with Jacobs that appeared in the October 1953 edition of the Inland Printer.12

  In a series on America’s private presses, P. J. Thomajan visited the Golden Eagle Press at Mount Vernon, New York, to meet “that Persian printer-philosopher Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs.” Jacobs’s press was famous for its editions of the works of E. E. Cummings. Thomajan de
scribed Jacobs as “a rare blend of mystic and realist, one blessed with a creative eye and hand, who finds interesting ways of fulfilling his visions. There is intuitive logic to his approach that results in inspired originalities.”

  “Jacobs,” writes Thomajan, “is paced to the modern tempo but he has nothing but disdain for the word modernistic.” Jacobs explained how “art springs not from rules and regulations but from feeling. If there is no feeling, logic is a blind alley and reason a dead end. Logic is a poor guide without the light of feeling. . . . Follow no one. Only yourself can lead you. . . . Approach your line of activity as an individual. . . . Be independent.”

  Little wonder Crowley was struck by Jacobs’s manifestation in his life; he had found, or been found by, a fellow spirit—a son of Aiwaz, no less!

  Thomajan reported how Jacobs felt the “closest affinity” to a work “by a fellow Persian,” The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, which he designed. But it was a precept taken from the Persian philosopher Zarathushtra that, according to Thomajan, “gives poise and persistence to this artist-craftsman. . . . Unto the persevering mortals the ever-present guardian angels are swift to assist.”

  Ever-present guardian angels! Swift to assist! Crowley knew the quotation. He had read it in William Wynn Westcott’s edition of the Chaldaean Oracles! The wisdom of Zarathushtra encapsulates the largely unknown relations of Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs and Aleister Crowley.

  The plot thickens. Crowley, most curiously, was never sure whether Jacobs might not have been, in some sense, Aiwass, his Holy Guardian Angel. The encounter with Jacobs’s mind seems to have set his own mind wandering into a number of unanticipated places.

  I now incline to believe that Aiwass is not only the God or Demon or Devil once held holy in Sumer, and mine own Guardian Angel, but also a man as I am, insofar as He uses a human body to make His magical link with Mankind, whom He loves, and that He is thus an Ipsissimus, the Head of the AA13

  As late as 1945, a question from Gerald Yorke about Aiwaz elicited the following quite extraordinary response.

  Surely Eq[uinox] of [the] Gods [Book 4, Part IV] covers your query re Aiwaz as fully as possible. The only part undetermined is whether He is a discarnate Being, or (as seemed possible after the Samuel Jacobs incident—Magick pp. 256 seq. Footnote 2 [original pagination]) a human being, presumably Assyrian, of that name. And that I simply do not know, and cannot reasonably surmise, because I do not know the limits of such an One.14

  The implications fair boggle the mind, which is precisely what we should expect from a Magus, and why something in us wants to take notice.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Unholy Holiness at 64a West Ninth Street

  The same day Crowley received the letter from Jacobs, he sat bolt upright through the freezing cold of the night until 5:30 a.m. writing what would become Liber Aleph, The Book of Wisdom and Folly. A concise book of Thelemic Wisdom, it was written for his “Son,” Charles Stansfeld Jones, though one suspects the “son” felt he could have done without it. Crowley said it was for love of his son that he wrote it, but it is difficult to understand why he put himself through so much physical and mental hardship to complete a work that was not even published in his lifetime.*171

  Liber Aleph is written in epistolary fashion in the style of the sacred magic of Abra-Melin given by “Abraham the Jew to his son Lamech,” or of Hermes Trismegistus’s wisdom given to his “son” Asclepius. By son, the hierophants meant closest disciple, and Crowley felt the necessity of keeping Jones close. Crowley clearly wanted to write an initiated text to stand alongside the classics of magical wisdom. That, presumably, is why he chose to employ the tremendous discipline of an archaic, hieratic style, archaic even for seventeenth-century England, to which period its tenor is closest, a style he maintained with tremendous discipline throughout its 208 chapters. Each chapter, given a Latin heading, takes precisely one page to compress its message of wisdom. Anyone who thinks for a second that Crowley was not extremely serious about his Magick, or that he stinted on occult scholarship, should consult this work. Timeless in its archaisms, its message is modern. The following is chapter 64, De Ratione Magi Vitae (“On Reason in the Life of the Magician”).

  Study thou Logic, which is the Code of the Laws of Thought. Study the Method of Science, which is the Application of Logic to the Facts of the Universe. Think not that thou canst ever abrogate these Laws, for though they be Limitations, they are the Rules of thy Game which thou dost play. For in thy Trances though thou becomest That which is not subject to those Laws, they are still final in respect of Those things which thou hast set them to govern. Nay, o my Son, this Word govern, liketh me not, for a Law is but a Statement of the Nature of the Thing to which it applieth. For nothing is compelled save only by Virtue of its own True Will. So therefore human Law is a statement of the Will and of the Nature of Man, or else it is a falsity contrary thereunto, and becometh null and of none effect.

  Chapter 84 attempts to explain to Jones what he was doing with the Scarlet Woman in workings such as the present one with Amalantrah. Crowley “did create an Image of my Little Universe in the mind of the Woman of Scarlet; that is, I manifested mine whole Magical Self in her Mind. Thus then in Her, as in a Mirror, have I been able to interpret myself to myself.” The medium locates the message. He then makes the point that such methods require constant alertness. Persons encountered in the magical mind must be tested by the “Holy Qabalah and by the True Signs of Brotherhood.” Each person encountered “shall be part of Thy Self, made individual and perfect, able to instruct thee in thy Path.” For Crowley, whether or not “Amalantrah” enjoyed objective being was purely semantic, the nature of the Working assured its reality, the microcosm being only the macrocosm in small; that is, as made accessible to the “vehicle.” As Hamlet put it: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Crowley did not hesitate to use the powers to which initiation had granted ingress.

  In March, still composing Liber Aleph, Crowley decided to put his skills squarely into an exercise of “goetic magick.” Goetic magick is magic involving command of “demons,” for goetia derives from the Greek for “sorcery.” Traditionally, in magic, King Solomon had control of demons, and importantly, he had the wisdom to keep them to their lowly place, as servants of lesser operations in the cosmic hierarchy. A demon uncontrolled is like permitting a delinquent hired to clean a car access to an arsenal of loaded weapons. That is what hierarchies are for: that beings may exercise the gifts over which they have responsible care, which is why democracy needs severe checks and balances, lest the mob rule and the structure of wisdom fall, as has occurred repeatedly with attendant, lasting misery.

  On March 9, at 10:40 p.m., Crowley began a sex-magick operation with Roddie to secure the “Earned Success” that a tarot reading of the “six of discs” suggested as a current possibility. They had taken Anhalonium lewinii (peyote), considered a “mercurial drug,” but it proved a “complete failure.” Rising to the astral, Crowley asked Amalantrah if the wizard approved his evoking Belial, as demon of Hod (the sephira of “splendor,” consistent with wealth). In Crowley’s book of correspondences, 777, Hod, is associated most strongly with Hermes, Thoth, and Mercury, and to the four eights of the tarot.

  According to a seventeenth-century grimoire, the Lesser Key of Solomon, familiar to Golden Dawn students, each zodiacal sign had three decans of ten degrees each (because there are twelve zodiacal signs and 360 degrees for the sun to “pass through” in its annual “cycle”). Each decan had two demons corresponding to it, one for day and one for night. Because the operation with Roddie was undertaken when the sun was in Aquarius, the relevant demons were Belial, night demon for the second decan, and Asmodee for the day.

  The first part of the operation went well from Crowley’s point of view. Crowley and Roddie were conjoined per vas nefandum (“by the abominable vessel” = anal sex), the rite “most demoniacally orgiastic.”1 Crowley noted that “this is a dangerou
s type of Work, because of Sacrament.” The “sacrament” was the mixed sexual fluids that formed the basis of materialization of the demonic spirits. He seems to have been implying that loss of control of the sacrament could lead to loss of control of the demonic spirit, which might then wreak havoc physically or psychologically.

  What they were doing with themselves becomes a little clearer in the Liber 729 Amalantrah Working record for Sunday, March 10. “Any desired Tarot Card can be invoked in this IX° way by begetting its hierarchy, and giving them our own bodies to manifest through, by feeling the Eucharist. So then we turn our own selves into talismans of Earned Success or the like. Names of Goetic demons can be used.” Presumably the demons’ use of the magicians’ bodies lasted only so long as the sacrament was active, though this point is not clear and would seem to be where the “danger” lay: the possibility of obsession. Crowley may have been clear about his control of evoked forces, but what of Roddie?

  By 12:20 a.m. on the Sunday morning, Roddie was rolling about in agony. As Crowley charitably put it, “The God Mercury being too pure for her corrupt mind and body.” The mescaline proving a dud, they had taken opium (the mercurial agent). The couple got to sleep eventually. Both felt refreshed and normal at 9:00 a.m. Because it was now day, they would have to “beget” Asmodee. “He has three heads: bull, man, ram; snake’s tail, goose’s feet, rides with banner and lance on a dragon.”2 Back on the astral plane at 2:35 p.m., Therion asked Amalantrah through Achita why opium didn’t suit her. Envisioning a duck’s head with a large beak, Achita (Roddie) assumed she’d taken too much. Therion asked, “Is this all rational?” To which Roddie replied, “Yes! 729 [Amalantrah] says that I must take HH [hash] drop by drop this pm.”3

  It would be Thursday, March 14, before they evoked Asmodee in themselves in a rite of “demoniacal ecstasy.” The session was followed by further discourse with Amalantrah, who was asked whether “Marie” was a friend to him and his work. The answer was ambiguous: the image of Pan’s reed, also the sign of Jupiter, which might suggest ransom, vengeance, pollution, revelation, and the angel of seven cups, with its suggestion of debauchery or dangerous pleasures.