Equally formative in Crowley’s life were the family’s daily Bible readings: after breakfast each morning, the three Crowleys and their four servants gathered in the dining room and took turns reading biblical verses aloud. Alick was captivated by the unusual sounding names—such as those in his favorite chapter, Genesis 5—and voraciously absorbed his father’s sermons on those familiar passages. Nevertheless, it was the woman whom he regarded as little more than one of the servants, his mother, who inspired Alick’s greatest fascination with the Bible: In moments of exasperation with her son, she would say he was the beast prophesied in the Book of Revelation. This curious assertion piqued his curiosity. The precocious youngster scurried back to his Bible and marveled at its apocalyptic conclusion, describing the tribulations to befall mankind; the appearance of the great beast 666, who branded his number on the foreheads of his followers; and the war in heaven between the woman clothed with the sun and the devouring beast. Heaven’s angels, harps and miracles paled beside the dragon, false prophet, and scarlet woman. He speculated on the message of this story. And he pondered what it meant if his mother was right.
Alick was four years old on February 29, 1880—a leap year—when his sister, Grace Mary Elizabeth, was born. She suffered convulsions and lived only four hours.90 When he was taken that day to see her body, Alick, too young to understand the joys of birth and the loss of death, was indifferent. He could do nothing about his sibling’s demise, and failed to understand why his parents bothered him with it.91 Nevertheless, Alick would feel Grace Crowley’s death through the subsequent changes in his life. Barely three months later, at the end of May, Edward Crowley left his home on the northwest side of Leamington. Although his whereabouts during this time are unknown, over a year later, on June 11, 1881, the Crowleys moved away from their painful memories to the Grange in Redhill, Surrey, which Aleister would later recall as “really an awfully nice place.”92
Their new home stood in a long garden that ended in woods overhanging the road. The sand pit across the road provided Alick with hours of amusement with his cousin Gregor Grant, who became a frequent visitor and playmate. He was six years older than Alick, who remembered him as a Presbyterian “very proud of his pedigree.”93 The Crowleys tolerated him because he was a relative; otherwise, all of Alick’s playmates were children of local Brethren. These carefree times he recalled as perpetual happiness.
The Grange, the Crowley family home in Redhill, Surrey. (photo credit 1.6)
When Alick turned eight, his father declared him old enough for boarding school. So Edward Crowley packed up his child to Hastings, where Henry Theodore Habershon (c. 1828–1885) and his sons Henry Earnest (b. 1861) and Arthur Herbert (b. 1864), as Messrs. Habershon & Sons, ran the White Rock School at 10 Pevensey Road in St. Leonards on Sea.94 Although not Brethren, they were extreme evangelicals, and as such were entrusted with Alick’s education … but not with his virtue. Before depositing his son at the school, Edward Crowley gave him one last lesson from Genesis, this time chapter nine:
And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
He closed the Bible, looked sternly into his son’s eyes, and enjoined him, “Never let anyone touch you there.” Although the rendition greatly impressed Alick, the reference to sodomy was lost on the boy, who thought little of the injunction at the time.
Alick’s time passed without replication of the story of Noah, and in 1885—following the death of Theodore Habershon95—he transferred to a school for sons of the Brethren. Located at 51 Bateman Street, Cambridge, its thirty-one-year-old headmaster, Reverend Henry d’Arcy Champney (1854–1942), seemed just the man to teach Alick: he had received his master of arts degree from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and although ordained an Anglican in 1878, he converted to the Brethren faith four years later, writing hymns for the faithful. A true zealot, he voted for Parliament by crossing out the candidates’ names and writing in “I vote for King Jesus.” According to Crowley, Champney was so pious he claimed never to have had marital relations with his wife. At the time, such claims meant no more to Alick than his father’s warning against sodomy.
Extracurricular activities at the school were rigorously religious. Although the boys played cricket, scoring was forbidden lest they commit the sin of emulation. Prayers, ceremonies, meetings, Bible readings, and sermons filled each Sunday, with only two hours allocated for other activities, such as reading books sanctioned for Sundays. On Monday nights, “Badgers’ Meetings” opened the big schoolroom to feed and proselytize the residents of Cambridge’s slum, Barnswell; alas, the visitors often left a bit of themselves behind, resulting in epidemics of ringworm, measles, and mumps at the school. Champney regarded illness among the boys as God’s punishment for some undisclosed sin.
“Alec,” as he now called himself, was initially happy at this school, writing exuberant letters home. Following in his father’s footsteps, Alec decided to be the most devoted servant of Jesus in the whole school:
I perceived a difficulty in the Scriptures. The beginning of my fall? I could not see how any one could be three days and three nights in the grave between Friday night and Sunday morning. I took my trouble to one of the masters, who admitted his own perplexity upon the point … he simply said that no one had been able to explain it. Then and there I resolved to astonish the world. Alas for boyish ambitions; the problem is still unsolved.96
He excelled in academics, and received White’s Selbourne prize for being at the top of his class in “religious knowledge, classics and French.”97
Around 1886, Alec also began writing his first poems. One of his earliest efforts, “Death of a Drunkard,” reveals that the boy’s exposure to poetry had been confined to Brethren hymns:
Just what the parson had told me when young:
Just what the people in chapel have sung:
“Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging.”98
Bright and amiable, the other boys liked and admired him, and he made many friends.
Nearly a year passed before Alec was suddenly called home in the middle of his spring 1886 term.
Edward Crowley was sick. Ironically, Dr. Paget had diagnosed the preacher with cancer of the tongue and recommended immediate surgery. The Crowleys couldn’t have asked for a more qualified opinion. Sir James Paget (1814–1899) had served as Queen Victoria’s surgeon in 1858, nearly three decades previously. He had since gone on to describe the second most common bone disease—subsequently called Paget’s disease—in 1876. He became a baronet in 1871, and by the time Edward Crowley became his patient in 1886, Paget presided over various professional medical societies.
The Brethren gathered to decide the Lord’s will in this matter, and Alec was brought home for moral support. In the end, they decided against surgery. Instead, Edward Crowley began seeing Count Cesare Mattei (1809–1896), inventor of electrohomeopathy, which purports to treat ailments through the therapeutic bioenergy in plant extracts. This new form of treatment generated interest in England at the time: Dr. A. S. Kennedy of St. Saviour’s Hospital in London had just published Notes on Count Mattei’s Electro-Homeopathic Remedies (1886), which advertised a cure “for Cancer and Kindred Diseases.”99 The Crowleys sold the Grange and moved to Glenburnie in Southampton to be closer to the Count.100
Although the doctors were optimistic and his father experienced no pain, the specter of death haunted Alec back at school. About a year later, on March 5, 1887, Alec woke from a disturbing dream about his father’s deat
h. The next day he learned his father had died the very night of his dream. Edward Crowley, at age fifty-two, was worth £150,000, equivalent to roughly $6 million by modern standards.101 He left his forty-one-year-old widow one-third of his estate; Alec would inherit another third—$2 million—when he came of age; and the final third went to other relatives, to whom Alec was legatee.
Alec’s “boyhood in hell,” as he later called it, began after the funeral. That was when everything changed: Emily adopted Edward Crowley’s cause, dutifully sending Brethren literature to the people in her husband’s address book. She also sold their house and spent the next year or two living in various hotels. Beneath the surface, however, she also changed as a person. This transformation resulted from yet another schism in the Exclusive Brethren. Known as the Raven Division after brother Frederick Edward Raven (1837–1903), it bitterly sundered friends and families over a doctrinal point regarding baptism: whether one was reborn into eternal life, or whether eternal life was attained through faith alone.102 Emily Crowley took the minority view and wilfully cut herself off from her dissenting intimates. Despite the love she once professed for them, none, she now believed, would reach heaven. Sadly, just as Edward Crowley’s faith had estranged Emily from most of her family, her own fanaticism now separated her from her friends.
How people could number among God’s chosen one day and collectively join the legions of the damned the next perplexed Alec. Reflecting on the images of his childhood, he saw Mary Carey, the Cowpers, Sister Musty, and others who were practically relatives now condemned to hell. In the boy’s eyes, his mother became “a brainless bigot of the most narrow, logical, and inhuman type.”103 Or, as he explained elsewhere, perhaps a bit more kindly, she was “marred beyond belief by the religious monomania which perhaps started in what one may call ‘Hysteria of Widowhood.’ ”104 For all that widowhood changed his mother, the religious schism among the Brethren demonstrated to Alec the problems of his faith. For an adolescent challenging and rejecting all that his parents held dear, he found Plymouth piety to be hypocritical.
Despite belonging to the Exclusive Brethren, Emily reestablished contact with her family after Edward’s passing, and they appear for the first time in Aleister Crowley’s various accounts of his childhood. Emily’s brother, with whom she often stayed in London, ought to have made a natural surrogate parent for Alec. Tom Bond Bishop (1839–1920) had moved to London around the time his own father had died of natural causes in 1854. He worked in the civil service as a customs clerk, advancing to a lucrative position. Known in philanthropic circles as an evangelical Christian, “T. B. B.” founded the Children’s Special Service Mission in 1867, which quickly grew to include the Children’s Scripture Union and Our Own Magazine, a one-penny monthly magazine of inspirational stories for children that he edited for many years. He was also a founding member of Civil Service Prayer Union, serving on its committee from July 1881 until he resigned in 1889 from “over work.”105 He was every bit as devoted to God as Edward Crowley. However, while Edward’s devotion garnered Alec’s respect, Uncle Tom’s earned nothing but scorn. A rigid and devout man, he represented all that Crowley came to hate about religion, and he remembered his uncle bitterly. “No more cruel fanatic, no meaner villain, ever walked this earth,” he wrote in his memoirs.106 He attributed White Stains, his Decadent book of erotic verse, to a fictional character bearing Tom’s family name. In later years, Crowley published his uncle’s obituary prematurely,107 and verbally attacked him while reviewing his book Evolution Criticised.108
Whereas the death of Alec’s sister barely registered on his consciousness at all, the passing of his father changed his life. In 1887, psychology was still in its infancy and no grief counselors were available to help the boy adjust to his loss. In Alec’s situation, typical adolescent coping strategies were unavailable: no family member felt close enough for him to talk to. The latest Brethren schism had cut him off from most social contact, and Emily had become, in his own words, hysterical. He could not turn to religion for comfort because he connected the Brethren faith with his difficulty. At age eleven, the boy found himself compelled to leave his carefree existence behind and become the man of the household. As biographer Martin Booth notes, it is at this point in his Confessions that Crowley begins referring to himself in the first person.
While grieving children experience feelings of isolation and loneliness, for Aleister Crowley it was genuine. Research indicates that parental death doesn’t directly affect long-term child adjustment, but short-term symptoms like anxiety, delinquency, and psychosomatic illness are common.109 Within three weeks of his return to Bateman Street, Alec made his first of many visits to the headmaster’s office. While Crowley fails to describe his misdeeds, he admits the first infractions were minor and were dismissed as an expression of grief. Soon, punishment became more severe: fifteen strokes “on the legs, because flogging the buttocks excites the victim’s sensuality!—15 minutes prayer, 15 more strokes of the cane—and more prayer to top it!”110 Then, one day after prayer time, Alec found himself in Champney’s office, not knowing why.
One of the children had described Crowley’s latest misdeed, and Champney wanted a confession. To his dismay, he received only protestations of innocence. “Come, come, Crowley,” the headmaster prodded impatiently. “You know that the Lord has a special care of this school, and he brings to light that which is done in darkness.” Champney offered a sermon peppered with fire and brimstone—not to mention several threats for good measure—before his patience reached an end. “Confess, boy,” he insisted, his eyes bulging like blisters on his face. At that point, Alec would have admitted to anything just to be rid of Champney. But not even knowing the charges, his only answer was silence. His sentence for refusing to come clean was placement in “Coventry,” meaning that no master or boy could speak to Alec nor he to them. During play hours, he would work; during work hours, he would wander the empty school yard. Social contact was forbidden, and in his isolation he would receive only bread and water. To end it, all Alec had to do was confess.
Uncle Jonathan Crowley was a striking contrast to Alec’s father. He had two children from a previous marriage, and his present wife was the children’s former governess. Like his brother Edward, he inherited both the family fortune—managing to live well without being ostentatious—and good looks. As Crowley wrote:
The tremendous brow, the eagle eyes, the great hooked arrogant nose, the firm mouth and the indomitable jaw combined to make him one of the most strikingly handsome men that I have ever seen.111
Clearly, for Alec the Crowley side of the family tree basked in Edward’s halo, while the Bishop branch was tainted with the same bigotry with which he painted his mother.
Alec looked unnaturally pallid and weak when Jonathan Crowley visited him at school during the following term. Although the boy made no complaints, his mistreatment was obvious. Hearing about the Badgers’ Meeting and subsequent ringworm outbreaks, Jonathan bristled. He confronted Champney and, threatening to call in the authorities, forced him to discontinue the practice. He then arranged for his nephew to see Justice Stirling in order to determine any other mistreatment at the school. This move intimidated Alec, who did not understand the legal system and feared that complaints could mean prison sentences for his mother or Uncle Tom. He insisted unconvincingly that he was perfectly happy at school, and so he was sent back.
By the time he went home that Christmas, Alec’s health had deteriorated so badly that even Emily asked questions. This time, Alec described his mistreatment, and she promised to take care of it. Her solution was to take Alec for a visit to her brother’s house, where unbeknownst to the child, Champney awaited. When he stepped inside Uncle Tom’s, Alec’s blood ran cold and his skin paled even more. He hid in the corner and uttered no complaints. After the holiday, he returned to school to complete his sentence.
The next term was nearly over when, during a visit by Uncle Tom, Alec described being placed in “Coventry”
for something he had supposedly done. Tom, in what Crowley later called “a lucid interval,”112 marched over to Champney’s office and insisted on knowing the charges. Accusations of drunkenness and sodomy convinced Tom to take Alec home. Shortly thereafter, several other parents reached the same conclusion about Champney, and the school reportedly closed.113 For Alec, however, the damage—both physical and psychological—had already been done: the doctor confirmed that Alec was indeed very ill. He had albuminuria—traces of albumin in his urine, suggesting kidney disease—and it was so serious that Alec was expected never to reach adulthood. The physician could only offer a prescription for country air.
This news must have been staggering. For Emily, she had lost her husband and now her only child had been handed a death sentence. Jonathan Sparrow Crowley had suffered from albuminuria for the past twenty years; right around this time, he would have begun vomiting blood and, after three weeks, would die on September 13, 1888.114 This could only have added gravity to Alec’s prognosis. And the boy lost another respected male role model in his life.
Emily Crowley moved in with her brother Tom in what is now Drayton Gardens. When Alec’s interest turned to books, he found his choices proscribed by the dogma of his mother and uncle: Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) was forbidden because of the character named Emily, lest Alec grow to disrespect his mother. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex was plain inappropriate, even though he had been expected to learn it in school. Worst of all was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) because the mariner’s encounter with the water snakes ends with the words “And I blessèd them unaware”115 … and everyone knew snakes were cursed in Genesis. This was a far cry from Edward Crowley, who once defended Alec’s reading of Robert Michael Ballantyne’s children’s book Martin Rattler: A Boy’s Adventures in the Forests of Brazil (1869) on a Sunday by telling Emily, “If the book is good enough to read any other day, then why not on Sunday? Every day is the Lord’s Day. The Jews observe a Sabbath, not us.” Those days were over, and now Alec had to sneak books home under his coat and lock himself in the bathroom to read them.
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