Alec at age fourteen. (photo credit 1.7)
The whole business of religion became intolerable. As he later put it, “I did not hate God or Christ, but merely the God and Christ of the people whom I hated.… The Christianity of hypocrisy and cruelty was not true Christianity.”116 All his woes came down to one word: sin. He lived in constant fear of it, stood accused and punished in its name, and lived miserably by its avoidance.
No more, he concluded. If everybody was so mistaken about God, they could also be wrong about sin. Thus, he decided to become a sinner. But not just any sinner: with the same zeal he showed over the theological poser of Christ’s three days in the grave, Alec decided to become the world’s best sinner. Petty transgressions like theft wouldn’t do. Instead, he contemplated the ultimate spiritual wrong: the only sin that could not be forgiven, the sin against the Holy Ghost. Nobody knew what it was, and even to guess was considered blasphemy. Maybe he couldn’t prove how Jesus was three days and three nights upon the cross from Friday to Sunday; but he vowed to solve this riddle. Once he discovered what this sin was, he resolved to do it, and thoroughly.
But what might it be? Was there a clue in the story his father told him about Noah? Did it have something to do with that mysterious activity Champney never engaged in with his wife? How did the accusations made against him at school fit in? He had a lot to learn about this business of sin.
Until he either died or was well enough to return to school, it was decided Alec would be taught by tutors handpicked by his Uncle Tom. In qualifications, academic credentials ranked second to religious faith, with the ability to engage Alec in his health-building regimen of travel, climbing, and fishing a distant third. His tutors were consequently fundamentalist degree-holders from minor Cambridge colleges. Alec considered them all to be his physical and intellectual inferiors and, compelled to get the better of them, watched tutors come and go so quickly that he soon lost count.
In the spring of 1891, at age fifteen, he embarked on a rest cure for whooping cough that consisted of a bicycle trip117 to the seaside resort of Torquay in the southwest of England. Although it would later become famous as the birthplace of Agatha Christie (a year earlier, in 1890), Torquay—along with Paginton and Brixham—was known as the English Riviera and enjoyed an international reputation as a haven for the rich and famous. Alec’s latest tutor and chaperone was James Archibald Douglas (b. 1866), a twenty-five-year-old teacher of arts and philosophy from Sheffield, Yorkshire.118 Alec collapsed twenty-eight miles outside of London, too ill to proceed, so the pair continued by train to their destination at 5 Cary Parade.
Despite the journey’s failure, the vacation proved most educational. As an Oxford University graduate and Bible Society missionary, Douglas had much to teach Alec, but most important was his refreshing—and surprising—normality. This tutor smoked and drank. He also played cards and billiards. And he thought women were a welcome pleasure in life, not vehicles of sin. Most importantly, however, he demonstrated one could safely enjoy these things in moderation. Far from his stifling home life, Alec found a completely new outlook. Crowley records, “He taught me sense and manhood, and I shall not easily forget my debt to him.”119
During the first ten days of his rest cure, Alec fell in love with a girl from the local theater. Together they retreated into a field to explore their attraction. Savoring the feeling of the spring breeze, sunshine, and soft skin against him, the fifteen-year-old lost much more than his virginity. He realized sex was not a subject of evil and sin; he understood its joy and beauty. And in that awakening he shed his obsession with sin like a heavy winter jacket.
Alec was soon well enough to attend part time a Streatham day school south of London. Here he discovered smoking, one of the top two on his Uncle Tom’s hit parade of sin. He recalled with amusement his uncle’s attempt to convey to him the moral of an article that he had written for Boys’ Magazine on the evils of drinking and smoking, “The Two Wicked Kings.” “Alec, my lad,” he summoned the boy over.
“Yes, Uncle?”
Tom replied predictably: “ ‘O my prophetic soul! mine uncle!’ ”
Alec knew this response well and, having by now learned Hamlet, quickly completed the quote: “ ‘Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast.’ ”
“Do you know of the two wicked kings?” Tom continued, undaunted. After a pause, he answered for Alec. “Drin-king and smo-king?”
Alec, having read the article, pointed out, “But, Uncle, you have forgotten to mention a third, the most dangerous and deadly of all.”
Uncle Tom pondered the riddle for a moment and drew a blank. Alec’s crude but astute identification—whether it was fuc-king or wan-king he does not say—stunned him.
To Alec, this “wicked king” business was just another example of Uncle Tom’s misguided enthusiasm. Papa had drunk wine, claiming he would rather preach to miserable drunkards than self-righteous teetotalers. Drinking, therefore, couldn’t be a serious offense. But Papa had also said, “If God had intended man to smoke, He would have supplied a chimney at the top of his head.” The observation did nothing to deter the habit Alec had learned at Streatham.
In recovery, Alec became a handsome young man. His hair was neatly cropped and his eyes dark, penetrating, brooding. Expressive lips and a wide square chin supported his features. His body possessed the sinew and virility of a young man in his prime. Suddenly, he found himself desirable to young women.
Alec thrilled when the new parlor maid120 flirted with him, but, too inexperienced to know how to respond, he shied away until, on her night off, he worked up the courage to flirt with her during a cab ride. Then, one Sunday, when Alec made some excuse not to join the family at church, he led the maid into his mother’s bedroom. For Alec, the thrill of seducing her on the bed of his pious mother was more than just an adolescent expression of oedipal urge; it was a victory over religious oppression.
Alec understood the maid’s flirting as simply an attempt to gain a better position in the household. However, when she complained to Tom Bond Bishop of how his nephew had corrupted her innocence, she found herself dismissed without references. Confronted with the story, Alec flatly denied the allegations. On the condition that he not be punished, he confessed that on one of the nights in question he was at the tobacconist’s with wicked school companions who had led him astray. Although he got off by pleading guilty to a lesser charge, the lie haunted him:
First we have a charming girl driven to attempt blackmail, next a boy forced to the most unmanly duplicity in order to exercise his natural rights with impunity, and incidentally to wrong a woman for whom he had nothing but the friendliest feelings. As long as sexual relations are complicated by religious, social and financial considerations, so long will they cause all kinds of cowardly, dishonourable and disgusting behaviour.121
The best thing to come of this unfortunate circumstance was Uncle Tom’s decision that Streatham provided a poor example for Alec.
On November 5, 1891, less than a month after his sixteenth birthday, Alec brought a ten-pound jar home from the grocer and filled it with two pounds of gunpowder. This he topped with metallic salts, sugar, and potassium chlorate. He dug a hole in the ground, inserted the jar, and lit the concoction. The explosion shattered windows nearby and left a large crater in the ground. Alec fell unconscious on the ground without ever hearing the boom, countless pieces of gravel embedded in his face. It would be Christmas before his eyes healed enough to be briefly exposed to light. Of focusing on his other senses without benefit of eyesight, he later recalled, “I did learn quite a lot from my famous Guy Fawkes day, when the bandages were on my eyes for 40 days.”122
Tom realized Alec had too much time on his hands—and idle hands were, after all, the devil’s playthings—and decided once again to send him to school. Thus, in the spring of 1892, Alec went to stay in Huntingdon’s No. 4 in Malvern, Worcestershire, a small town in the English Midlands. Here he enrolled in a militia, the First Worcestershire Ar
tillery Volunteers.123 The school had a name in sports, and Alec—not well enough to participate—became the butt of abuse. He grew painfully familiar with two great pastimes of bullies everywhere: greasing (spitting into someone’s face) and pill-ragging (clenching someone’s testicles). At the school, Crowley recalled, “Buggery was the rule”;124 his study companion even made money as a prostitute. He parlayed this information into a speedy transfer for the following year.
Alec spent his summer vacationing with his mother on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, whose main attraction is the hilly terrain known as the Black Cullins. Here Alec met Sir Joseph Lister (1827–1912) at the Sligachan Inn. Lister, although remembered as the physician who introduced antisepsis to surgery, was also an avid mountaineer, and he persuaded a group of climbers to take Alec up the 3,162-foot Sgurr-nan-Gillean. Crowley was hooked by the experience, which marked the first of many competitive climbs. During his vacation in Skye that September, he also climbed Sgurr a’ Ghreadaidh (3,192 feet), Bruach na Frìthe (3,143 feet), Am Basteir (3,064 feet), Sgurr a’ Mhadaidh (3,012 feet), and the Bloody Stone (33 feet).125
That fall of 1892, he transferred to the Tonbridge School in Kent, where his house was Ferox Hall.126 Located in historic Tonbridge with its thirteenth-century motte-and-bailey castles, Tonbridge School was one of the nation’s top schools. Founded in 1553 by Sir Andrew Judde (c. 1492–1558), it rested on 150 acres at the north edge of Tonbridge; it had been largely rebuilt as the school grew in size and status in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Early in his fall term, Alec again took ill. As he recalls cryptically in The World’s Tragedy:
My health broke down; partly, one may say, through what would have been my own fault or misfortune if I had been properly educated; but, as it was, was the direct result of the vile system that, not content with torturing me itself, handed me over bound and blindfold to the outraged majesty of Nature.127
A marginal note in his personal copy of the book clarifies: he “caught the clap from a Glasgow prostitute.”
Boarding school seemed too strenuous for Alec, so his mother sent him to Eastbourne to live with a Brethren tutor named Lambert. There he enjoyed more freedom than he expected from a Darbyist. He wrote more poetry, which he contributed to both the Eastbourne Gazette and The Christian.128 He also spent much of his free time playing chess, easily beating the best players in town, and eventually writing the “Chess Notes” column for the Eastbourne Gazette under the pseudonym Ta Dhuibh.129 That spring and summer, he climbed literally dozens of peaks in Snowdonia, Wales, and in England’s Lake District.130 His passions for poetry, chess, and mountain climbing blossomed.
With chalk cliffs rising 575 feet above sea level, Beachy Head is the highest headland on England’s south coast. Its crumbling edifice projects into the English Channel from its location in East Sussex on the east end of South Downs. British mountaineer Edward Whymper (1840–1911) and his brother nearly killed themselves trying to climb it in the mid-1800s.
Victorian England birthed and buried the craze of chalk-cliff climbing. It originated with some bright alpinist’s contention that Britain’s sea cliffs made great practice mountains when, in fact, their chalk faces crumbled too readily to be climbed safely. After he had become a seasoned climber, Crowley wrote, “English rock climbing is the most severe and difficult in the world.”131 Walter Parry Haskett Smith’s (1859–1946) guidebook Climbing in the British Isles: England132 declared that the chalk cliffs of Sussex were climbable only up to twenty feet above high-water mark. Similar claims were made by Albert Frederick Mummery (1855–1895), whom the Encyclopaedia of Mountaineering calls “the foremost climber of the second half of the last century, with justifiable claims to be regarded as the founder of modern Alpinism.”
Crowley, looking upon Beachy Head in 1894, doubted these estimates. Having spent the previous summer climbing in England with his cousin Gregor Grant—whom he described as someone “who considers climbing for climbing’s sake as stupid, if not actually sinful”133—Crowley believed they could conquer this unclimbable cliff. He surveyed the edifice and noted its most conspicuous pinnacles: the peak closest to the sea was known as the Devil’s Chimney and consisted of two pinnacles separated by a gap: the Needle was the outermost peak, and the Tooth was innermost. Further inland beside it was Etheldreda’s Pinnacle, with the Cuillin Crack’s two-hundred-foot cliff overhanging it. They began climbing on April 4.
Passing to the top of the grassy slope that ran along the base of the Devil’s Chimney, they marveled at the beautiful sight of the sunlit cliffs before them, the sea behind, and the clouds above. To the right of the Cuillin Crack was a cleft, which Crowley named Etheldreda’s Walk after his dog,134 that ran “round Etheldreda’s Pinnacle, to the foot of Grant’s Chimney.” Etheldreda’s Pinnacle was accessible by twin chimneys—deep grooves in the cliff wall—that stretched before him like chalk incarnations of Castor and Pollux. He liked the analogy and thus dubbed the chimneys after the Greek twins. Crowley began climbing Castor, the north access way, until its chalk face gave way and buried his legs in a cloud of rubble. Undeterred, he wriggled free of the debris and pressed on. Progress was slow, even glacial, to avoid further mishaps; to the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, Alec described his ascent as “a chemical combination of the writhe, the squirm, and the slither.” Arriving at the top and sitting upon its square summit, he could feel Etheldreda’s Pinnacle teeter and sway beneath him. Cleare and Collomb, in their account of sea-cliff climbing in Britain, write, “The traverse on a chalk and grass slope of 50 degrees’ steepness below the cliff proved to be a nightmare of insecurity. One can therefore only marvel at Crowley and his friends who managed to effect a traverse on this slope.”135
They returned three months later, on July 4, to tackle the Devil’s Chimney, conquering several landmarks and deeming others unclimbable. Of climbing the Tooth, Crowley reported,
Both the N[orth] and E[ast] faces were coated with loose layers of chalk, which came away with a single touch, but the E[ast] had the advantage of being less vertical.… The laborious nature of the climbing is evidenced by the fact that two hours and more were required to overcome a vertical height of only thirty feet.136
Subsequent climbs took place on July 11 and 13 and on October 1. Despite having deemed the Needle unclimbable from his promontory atop Etheldreda’s Pinnacle, Crowley set his sights on its peak on July 13. Proceeding into the gap that separated the twin peaks of the Tooth and the Needle, Alec sought a surface solid enough to climb. Cutting steps into the nearly vertical walls proved futile. After five failed attempts, Alec finally scooped out a hole in the wall, planted his chin in it, and used his free hands to haul himself up. Using this unconventional tactic, he emerged on the other side of the gap, after which ascent of the Needle was easy. While Gregor waved the Union Jack from the Tooth’s pinnacle, Crowley gazed proudly from the top of the Needle, surveying the landscape below. They stood where no one else had ever stood, achieved what no climber had before. They had conquered the Devil’s Chimney.
The Devil’s Chimney at Beachy Head, July 13, 1894, showing Gregor Grant atop the Tooth (right) and Aleister Crowley atop the Needle (left). (photo credit 1.8)
Their October 1 attempt on Cuillin Crack was less successful. Crowley judged this ascent “the finest and most difficult piece of climbing that I have yet found in the whole neighbourhood.”137 Consequently, after scaling the first sixty feet or so of its two-hundred-foot height, he became too exhausted either to climb further or to pull up Gregor. Thus Alec remained wedged in the crack while his cousin fetched the coast guard to lower a rope and help pull him out.
These ascents are best understood in retrospect. The sport of chalk-cliff climbing is esoteric, and its Victorian period “would have been inconsequential were it not for Aleister Crowley.”138 Etheldreda’s Pinnacle, though only twenty-five feet high, is rated a “very severe” climb, and Cleare and Collomb dubbed Crowley’s ascent “a remarkable achievement and in c
oncept years ahead of its time.”139 Crowley’s attempt of Cuillin Crack—probably omitted from his memoirs because its abortive attempt required his rescue—was nevertheless so important that the feature is now called Crowley’s Crack. Although others soon repeated the climbs, sea-cliff climbing died out within six years. No other ascents were recorded until the sport experienced a rebirth in the 1980s; today, the upper part of the Devil’s Chimney has collapsed into the sea.
If history accords Crowley a place for his climbs, this was not the case at the time. The initial response to his achievements left Alec cold. A local newspaper began its coverage of the climb with the words, “Insensate folly takes various forms.” Mummery initially dismissed Crowley as a braggart. Before long, however, these climbing records on Beachy Head were verified, and Alec established himself as a pioneer of the short-lived sport of sea-cliff climbing.
Shortly after this victory, Gregor announced his engagement and that he could no longer climb on Beachy Head with his cousin, but Alec’s love of climbing continued unabated. He traveled to Tyrol, Austria, with his tutor and attempted his first Alpine climbs. Unable to find a satisfactory guide, he set out with A. E. and M. W. Maylard and climbed the Schrötterhorn nearly to the top, despite the bad snow, as well as Vertainspitze. In the Italian Alpine village of Sulden he made solo ascents of Monte Cevedale (12,382 feet), Suldenspitze (11,076 feet), Tschengglser Hochwand (11,073 feet), Gran Zebrù (12,635 feet), Thurwieserpitze (11,982 feet), Ortler (12,812 feet), and others.140 While climbing the Ortler, he reached its peak by the Hintere Grant in only six and a half hours, where he met an American and his guide, who, he learned, had climbed up the other side … the easy side. Alec never again climbed with guides, feeling safer relying on his own instincts and natural talent. The Alps proved unforgettable, and Alec would return regularly for the next four years.
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