Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Fig. 35.1. William B. Seabrook (seated), with writer, Aldous Huxley

  Two remarkable photographs of Crowley with brushes, canvas, and easel, painting beneath shady branches amid the hazy heat of Decatur have survived. In one we see him sitting on a fruit crate in knickerbockers and a large tweed jacket with huge pockets, bending forward as he applies a touch to the lower part of a four-foot canvas. He appears to be smoking a cheroot. In the other, still sitting on his crate, he stares at the camera, hands on his knees. After nearly five years in the United States, Crowley had aged noticeably, become more thickset in his shoulders and back, somewhat more intense, and essentially solitary. He has the “phallic forelock,” a lonely outcrop of hair atop the hazelnut dome. The face is gaunt, defined, ruddy, certainly not round as people always imagine it. His remaining hair is trimmed short at the sides, and he has a wispy goatee and hint of a mustache to the edges of his lips. His eyes are steady, impassive, yet project an unmistakable air of having suffered pain, his cheek lines intersecting with the lines of his forehead like a St. Andrew’s cross. In his artist’s neckerchief and explorer-like solidity, he is as rugged as a pioneer, for that is what he is. There is, nevertheless, a sense of world weariness, hardly surprising, and an aura of disappointment. What extraordinary things have happened in that man? Those eyes have seen. His demeanor asks a laconic question of the onlooker: “So what do you know?”

  Fig. 35.2. Aleister Crowley painting at Decatur, Georgia, Fall 1919 (Courtesy of Ordo Templi Orientis)

  While at Seabrook’s, Crowley was interviewed for the Hearst-owned Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine, there described respectfully as an “authority in occultism” by the magazine’s editor, Angus Perkerson, under the headline POET-PAINTER WHO STUDIED MAGIC UNDER INDIAN SAVANTS VISITS ATLANTA. Perkerson’s article may have been linked to Seabrook’s friendship with fellow Hearst-journalist Ward Greene, since Ward Greene cut his teeth on the Atlanta Journal. This would explain how Greene was able to put a fictional version of Crowley in his novel Ride the Nightmare (1930) about Seabrook and “Deborah Luris,” introduced to Seabrook’s fantasy world by the Crowley character “Bellerophon Cawdor” with its Seabrookian witch-tones from Macbeth. It would also explain Crowley’s references in Confessions to the infamously racist Leo Frank trial and lynching (see here), because it was Ward Greene who closely covered the story for the Atlanta Journal and based his successful, realistic novel Death in the Deep South on his research for the case. Ward Greene was most likely Crowley’s guide to the ominous social tremors in the Deep South, especially as Greene reviewed D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (with its celebration of the Ku Klux Klan), and the movie’s rapturous reception in Georgia, for the Atlanta Journal in 1915.

  After his sojourn at Decatur and Atlanta, Crowley went to Detroit, but his arrival there was not propitious. Needing to get out, he headed south again to the Mammoth Caves in Edmonson County, Kentucky.

  The caves were accessible thanks to the Mammoth Cave Railroad, a short line with a simple steam locomotive and one wooden coach, which ran as a spur from the Louisville and Nashville Railroad over a trestle bridge at Doyle Valley. In 1913 the round train trip, hotel, meals, and tour cost $11.75. Which is to say, it would have made more geographic sense if Crowley visited the caves on his way from Atlanta to Detroit, or as a break on his way back to New York before a last visit in November to the “bug-house,” as he called it, of Detroit.

  Either way, the four hundred miles of subterranean caverns, labyrinths, and passageways that make the Mammoth Caves “mammoth” in size (hence the name) and the most extensive explored cave system in the world, made a correspondingly mammoth impression on Crowley’s imagination. He rated the site, set in Kentucky’s Green River Valley due south of Fort Knox, as a “wonder of the world,” up there with Niagara and the Grand Canyon—he was only sorry that he hadn’t had a chance to see Yellowstone Park. When Crowley visited, there was notorious in-fighting among farmers and landowners, with attempts to divert tourists from another owner’s caves by changing road signs and planting false hitchhikers on the roads who told visitors the caves they wanted to see were closed for safety reasons, but luckily for the driver, they knew “better” ones. The issues were finally settled when the Mammoth Caves became a U.S. National Park in 1941. The Beast returned to Detroit in November 1919, an experience that contributed to a lasting sense of repulsion where U.S. Freemasonry was concerned, which spleen he vented in his Confessions some five years later. He characterized the Detroit Craft as shallow and duplicitous, shaming Masonic ideals with personal jealousies and attempts to make money out of their position and to exploit Crowley himself. In the main he was misunderstood. Where he was simple and straightforward, they thought him cunning and diabolical; where generous and openhearted they thought him Machiavellian, his “yes” was just a sinister way of saying “no,” and so on.

  Not everyone associated with the attempt to establish the O.T.O. in Detroit earned Crowley’s ire. According to Crowley, Dr. Frank E. Bowman was an exception to the rule.

  The best of the crowd was a young doctor who had sufficient sense to see how stupid the rest were, to disdain the bluff of the advertising adepts, and to realize that genuine magicians were necessarily gentlemen and scholars. He felt himself utterly lost in the darkness of Detroit, but despaired of mending the matter by setting forth to seek the Graal without guidance. . . . The man had many great qualities, but the dollar-snatching charlatans that pullulate in America had driven him to drift and potter. He did not even understand that he might have saved his soul by devoting himself to the shallowest quack in Chicago, daring death and damnation for the hollowest humbug that ever wrote himself Rosicrucian without knowing how to spell it. Pluck would have pulled him through in the long run; as Blake said, “if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”3

  Crowley saw one of the biggest obstacles he faced in attempting to achieve progress in America was the very expectation of guaranteed “progress” attending on every transaction. Crowley surgically isolated what he considered the abiding strength-turned-weakness of the American system as he experienced it at the time.

  How often had he observed the office placard “Come in without knocking. Go out the same way.” This principle he analyzed as a cardinal weakness. Unpleasant truths were unwelcome: leave the sleeping sentinel asleep; better still, give him chloroform so he doesn’t wake up! This, Crowley believed, “Americans” had deduced as a universal principle from the psychological fact that confidence is a real asset. On the basis that a man works best when he feels sure to succeed, Crowley saw fear of failure corrupting every faculty.

  The vogue of Christian Science, and countless cults for drawing in dollars by wishing one had them, persuading oneself that somehow or other they will arrive, scorning every success, forgetting every failure, shutting one’s eyes to unpleasant facts, and interpreting every bit of good luck as a triumph beyond the power of trumpets to tell—a token of the intense interest taken by the Almighty in His favourite child—this course of conduct, though its more reasonable practitioners are ready to admit that it is rant and rubbish, is pursued as part of a calculated policy. They are ready to fool themselves in order to take advantage of the stimulating effect of optimism.4

  What accompanied this essential fear of failure was a dread of the spirit of criticism. Criticism suggested superiority—God forbid!—an American crime. Were not all men born equal? As confidence for its own sake had become a universal solvent, so projected self-confidence quickly degenerated into self-worship, absurd levels of febrile sensitivity and almost concreted egotism. Self-confidence proved you were “in” with God, with material wealth the natural, even supernatural, reward: an expectation. This was, after all, the “Promised Land,” and its Canaanites languished on reservations, out of view. Crowley saw the affliction as having arisen out of the conditions of expansion to the west, the real “how the West was won.”

  The States have been won from the wilderness
by a system demanding courage and clear sight from the pioneers; but once the trail was blazed, the rest of the work was done on a basis of credit which a European banker would consider utterly reckless gambling. Everyone, from the farmer and merchant to the manufacturer and financier, entered into a tacit agreement to bet that any given enterprise would succeed. As the natural resources were there, while luck decreed that the common-wealth should not have to face any overwhelming obstacle, the gamblers have won. It is obvious that any man in an outpost besieged by nature (such as is every new settlement outside New England, the Atlantic coast, and the old settlements in the south) was really a traitor if he said, however truthfully, anything which might daunt the spirit of his comrades. Those men won out through sheer ignorance of the chances against them, stolid stupidity which blinded them to their desperate plight and bestial insensibility to the actual hardships which they had to endure. It was criminal to insist on the existence of evils for which there was no remedy.

  This spirit has persisted, though its utility is past. It has become a fixed feature of the religion of the country. It was the deadliest delusion that I had to meet. Spiritual attainment, magical; development, any line of work soever whose material is subtler than the sensible world, demands (as the first condition of success) the most severe spirit of scepticism, the most scientific system of research.5

  Very little was accomplished in Detroit during Crowley’s visit, but for a session with Jones signing preliminary pledge forms for potential initiates, rather than, as had been done in April, mere Masonic affiliation to the O.T.O. With Dr. Hill alienated, and Ryerson excluded from the Grand Council of the Lakes VII°, there were only four of the original charter members left.

  One night at Ryerson’s home in November, Ryerson rehearsed an O.T.O. ritual. This innocent activity would be regurgitated by the press in 1922 as a sinister rite, because it allegedly involved kneeling before a priestess, which “revelation” tells us that it was probably Crowley’s Gnostic Mass that was being rehearsed.6 By the time the Detroit press had turned the O.T.O. into a Satanic cult, and The Equinox had been branded by Detroit police as the wickedest book in the city, with all copies to be seized to protect citizens from immorality, Crowley was long gone.

  On December 18, 1917, the U.S. Senate had proposed the 18th Amendment. Supported by thirty-six states, it was ratified on January 16, 1919. Passing into effect on January 16, 1920, the so-called Volstead Act, or National Prohibition Act, passed Congress over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto on October 28, 1919. It defined legally what constituted intoxicating liquor and provided for enforcement. As Crowley predicted, Prohibition led directly to national obsession with alcohol and to the swift emergence of the intimidating crime syndicate; the gangster triumphed while the law became ever more invasive of personal liberty. The individual was hit from all sides. Had Crowley been a bottle, he would have been prohibited too. America was no longer a place where the Beast could operate effectively. As The Book of the Law declares: “The word of Sin is Restriction” (AL I:41).

  Alas, no one took Crowley’s response to the national Prohibition movement as it emerged in a clever, prescient, but unfinished, draft of analysis called “The Prohibitionist-Verbotenist 1919,”7 an important text on the commonsense value of Crowleyan liberty. He coined the idea that the Prohibitionist was none other than the repressive Prussian militarist in new guise. If you thought you had won the war, bud, look what’s under your own nose! The one who insists that this or that practice ist verboten! is revealed as one unable to square up to the challenge of life, reliant on, and instrumental in, widespread repression. The real Verbotenist, it turned out, was an honest-to-God American! Crowley analyzed the psychology of the typical repressed-repressor, a type we see forever attempting to control us through the media, police, pulpit, or any other inlet or outlet open to the upturned snout of professional busybodies and ideological fanatics. One can well imagine Crowley’s response to the “P.C.” brigades!

  Crowley begins his broadside with a consideration of how body and mind interact.

  The practical issue to which I propose to call attention in this paper is that a man’s opinions reflect his physical constitution. They are not based on abstract ideals of justice, except in the case of exceptionally first-class men who have no weak spots in their organization, and have in addition practised the philosophical act of detachment.

  Crowley explains with great clarity the folly of misplaced humanitarian-ism, how beliefs about equality and fairness are not only used as a cover for weakness and fear, but are also imposed on situations where consideration of such issues, however desirable in principle, becomes utterly ruinous.

  If an anarchist challenges my right to my property, I reply that the Law is on my side, and that the police and the army and navy are ready to defend me with their lives. If he makes a successful revolution, it is through the failure of the physical forces on my side; and he in his time will be compelled to establish similar forces to defend his opinions. In other words, he will make a new Law. But no amount of fine talk will enable him to contract out of the Law of Physical Force.

  If all men were converted suddenly to “humanitarian” principles, how long would it be before the race was swept from the planet by some no longer checked species of wild animal such as the wolf or even the rat with his fearful weapon, the Plague?

  Now the first condition of Liberty (as we are told) is eternal vigilance, but we must add: readiness to fight for the rights we have won. But if we fight only for those rights that we ourselves value, we shall be split up into 100 sects. We must therefore fight for the people’s rights as for our own. The strong man can do this; the weak man, selfish and short-sighted, can never put the general welfare before his own, or even weigh the concerns of mankind, the testimony of history, the opinions and practice of the best men with his fad.

  What then are the rights for which we must fight? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We are then to see to it that no man deprives us of these things; if we are citizens of the American Republic we accept this duty as a prime condition of our citizenship.

  . . . All this is true; but at present there is such terrible danger of its being forgotten that it may as well be repealed.

  One of the worst defects of civilization is that the excretory system of Nature ceases to function. Society today is clogged with faecal matter, because the weakling does not die. He is not cast out, but remains to infect us.

  We have made mere living progressively easier, and the result is that most people would be better dead. They live, but without being equal to life, joyous, conquerors of Nature; and all they can do is to complain.

  They do not even believe in strength and beauty any more; they have persuaded themselves that all men are weak and ugly as they are themselves. They feel their inferiority so acutely that they are forced to invent a morality—the slave-morality of Nietzsche—and they gnash their teeth to see that the real men, the people who are functioning as they themselves cannot do, laugh at their pretensions.

  You remember Aesop’s Fable of the Fox who had lost his tail, and tried to persuade the other foxes that it was a great advantage? But nowadays that fox is foxier; he tries to get a law passed prohibiting tails. The whole structure of civilization is being levelled to the ground by the efforts of the “persecutor-persecuted” type of neurotic. To put one brick upon another is so unfair and cruel to the lower brick: that is the theory to which we are supposed to subscribe in the name of Democracy. It is unfair to the rest of men to claim a woman’s love for oneself alone: that is modern “Altruistic Morality.” All aptitudes are to be condemned; we must not ride in an automobile, while there are still those who cannot afford it and we must not walk, because it makes the poor cripples feel bad about it.

  I have dealt with this theory in the most general terms, for it is theory that is responsible. But there is a particular and imminent case of the mania of the “persecutor-persecuted” which has already endangered a grea
t part of the liberties of the people, and threatens worse things yet.8 [draft, unfinished, ends here]

  Does this not have validity today, perhaps as much as when Leah Hirsig wrote it down in an exercise book nearly a century ago? Have we learned the lesson? Within a few years, Crowley himself was to become prime target for the “persecutor-persecuted.” He refused to react to it; 666 was the number of a man: he would be no “martyr,” claiming extraordinary “rights.”

  We do not know if it was the imminence of Prohibition that sealed Crowley’s decision to leave America, or whether it was simply a result of an aching fatigue. He was thirty-nine when he arrived in the United States; he was now forty-four. The mind of Western Europe was stirring. The old order had crumbled and was crumbling still. Crowley wanted to be where the action was. On November 5, 1919, perhaps regretting her lover’s imminent departure, Leah wrote to him, “I loved you all the while I was with you. I’ve loved you since you left me—I love you now in spite of stupid stories &c. more than ever.”