In September 1894 he applied for membership in the Scottish Mountaineering Club. He was balloted for and elected at their December 7 meeting.141
Returning to Eastbourne from the Alps, Alec found relations with his tutor strained. One day, he and Lambert got into an argument that turned critical when Lambert began throwing punches; Alec caught him in a hammerlock with one arm and pounded his tutor’s face with the other. Another incident involved Lambert’s daughter, Isabelle, whom Crowley described as “the only pretty and decent member of the family.”142 Over breakfast, Alec watched her parents forbid her to see her fiancé because he would not convert to the Brethren faith; when their admonishments and abuse drove her to tears, Alec interrupted to tell her parents how revolting and cruel he found them. Another blowup ensued, and Lambert telegraphed Tom Bishop to fetch his nephew.
The family row that Alec expected over this incident never materialized. His mother, grateful to see Alec prosper in manhood rather than dying as the doctors had predicted when they first diagnosed him with albuminuria, eased her stranglehold. And when he expressed his interest in the sport that had helped turn him into a strapping young man, she sent him back to the Alps sans chaperone. He had come of age.
If only in sheer numbers of ascents, 1895 was his best year for climbing.143 Returning to the Bernese Alps in south-central Switzerland, Alec scaled many of its peaks, including the Eiger (13,025 feet), which he conquered alone. Noting no record of an ascent of Trift (7,667 feet) from the Mountet side, he and an “intelligent-looking young Englishman”144 named Ellis climbed it in half a day. Other victories included the peaks of the Jungfrau (13,642 feet), Mönch (13,474 feet), and the Wetterhorn (12,113 feet). Many alpinists—H. V. Read, W. Larden, O. Eckenstein, A. E. Maylard, and H. Solly among them—recognized AC, as Alec had become known, as a promising young climber, and several took him under their wings. Among them was Dr. John Norman Collie (1859–1942), whom he later described as “unquestionably the finest all-round climber of his generation.”145 Collie was about to embark on his fateful expedition to Nanga Parabat, in which A. F. Mummery, with whom AC corresponded about Beachy Head, would be lost. However, Collie proposed Crowley for membership in the Alpine Club, with Sir Martin Conway (1856–937)—who would later preside over the Alpine Club from 1902 to 1904—seconding the motion; the application, however, was rejected. From that time, Crowley would have nothing but scorn for the club. Founded in London in 1857, it was the world’s first mountaineering club, and in those days it had many charateristics of a gentlemen’s club—staid, exclusive, superior, and authoritarian—making it an easy target for Crowley’s scorn.146
Another of Collie’s interests was the occult. Whether it was mysticism, magic, alchemy, or folklore, the unexplainable fascinated him. He believed in the Loch Ness Monster and reported being followed on Scotland’s highest summit, Ben Macdui (4,295 feet), on Easter of 1891—whether by a ghost or by the legendary Am Fear Lias Mòr (Scotland’s Sasquatch, the Big Grey Man) he did not speculate, but he remarked that “No power on earth will ever take me up Ben Macdui again.” This, along with tales of old Gaelic mountain gods and goddesses, he would often relate to friends around campfires or in his den, according to his biographer Christine Mill, “no one quite knowing how much he was believing himself.”147 As Crowley recalled, “Norman Collie, of all people, by the way, was very keen on alchemy in the days when we climbed rocks together.”148 That Collie was also a scientist—an organic chemist at University College, later department chair and, after his 1928 retirement, professor emeritus—no doubt made a great impression on Crowley, who would many years later define magick as an art and science, coining the phrase “the method of science, the aim of religion” and dubbing his methodology “scientific illuminism.” Not long after meeting Collie, Crowley would begin to consider himself a young authority on alchemy, expounding the subject to anyone who would listen. Most remarkably, Collie was but the first of three highly influential climber-chemists that Crowley would meet in as many years.
A telegram from home cut short AC’s perambulations upon the Bernese Oberland. Mother and Uncle Tom were sending him to Trinity College, Cambridge, and entrance exams were a week away.
CHAPTER TWO
A Place to Bury Strangers
The halls of Trinity College, Cambridge, opened to AC in October 1895. There he took a room in 16 St. John’s Street, far from the relatives who would have liked to choose his friends, teachers, and diversions. Instead, no Plymouth tutor monitored his actions for moral probity, and no censor told him what to do or read. Plus, as an adult, he was finally entitled to £50,000 in discretionary funds—equivalent to $2 million by today’s standards—from his father’s estate. As he would describe one of his own students many years later, he was free, white, and twenty.
Gone was Edward Alexander Crowley, for, as a free man, he had no desire to go by his given name. Gone too was the boy’s name Alec. So how should the chess, poetry, and mountaineering wunderkind be appropriately addressed? A cursory examination of his surname led him to conclude that Crowley derived from the common Irish O’Crowley. With poets W. B. Yeats and George Moore making Ireland and all things Irish fashionable at that time, AC naturally wished to participate in the Celtic revival. He therefore tried the Gaelic form of Alexander: Aleister.
He pondered it a moment and recalled reading that for fame, the best combination of stressed and unstressed syllables were a dactyl followed by a spondee: the pattern of one long or accented syllable, two short, one long, one short … like Algernon Swinburne. Aleister Crowley. It fit the pattern. He liked it. And so he became known.
Ranking highly among his first acts of independence was his refusal to attend chapel, lecture, or hall. He told the junior dean that chapel—obligatory Sunday morning religious services—was forbidden by his Plymouth upbringing as being outside his faith, and that “the seed planted by my father, watered by my mother’s tears, would prove too hardy a growth to be uprooted.”1
When a political economics professor described the subject as very difficult due to lack of reliable data, Aleister, favoring the discipline of mathematics and chemistry to what sounded like superstition, closed his notebook and returned to class only for exams, which he passed easily. Finally, Cambridge’s 8:30 dinner hour was untenable as it broke up what could otherwise be a productive evening. Raised in isolation from his peers, the thought of sitting in a dining hall filled with his classmates was at best uncomfortable. Thus Aleister arranged with the kitchen to send food to his room at his convenience.
Before long, he fell into a pattern of beginning work—reading, writing, and studying—at midnight, an hour he was certain no social calls could interrupt him, and continuing straight through until dawn. When tired of toiling during these long nights, he wandered the campus alone, pondering how many great men had walked in Neville’s Court; or watched from Garret Hostel Bridge as mist rolled over the river below; or, from his room, simply watched the sun rise over the tower of St. John’s Chapel.
While his nocturnal lifestyle left him with few friends at Cambridge, the tale of fellow undergraduates throwing Crowley into Trinity’s fountain2 is apocryphal at best. Cambridge’s debating society, the Magpie and Stump, attracted his attention from 1895 to 1897, but he ultimately found it “absurd for these young asses to emit their callow opinions on important subjects.”3 A better fit was the Cambridge University Chess Club, where, in his first term, he beat its president, William Vawdrey Naish (1873–1956), and was humbled by Henry Ernest Atkins (1872–1955), future nine-time British chess champion.4 Crowley ultimately became the chess club’s president. Representing Cambridge in intervarsity matches, he usually won, as he did on March 27, 1896, when he came out of a lost position to beat N. H. Robbins of Oxford, or in a February 20, 1897, match against the City of London Chess Club, where he bested Edward Bageshott Schwann (1872–1902), who had received the Wills prize for an interclub record of twelve wins, three draws, and no losses. However, fortune wasn’
t always on Crowley’s side: in an April 2, 1897, match against Oxford at the British Chess Club in Covent Garden, his opponent, E. George Spencer-Churchill (c. 1876–1964)—Winston Churchill’s cousin—came from behind to win the match. Similarly, in a November 20, 1897, match between the Chess Club and the Senior Club, Crowley lost against William Hewison Gunston, MA (1856–1941), a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and well-known chess player.5
His most influential friend at this time, however, was a senior named Adamson. AC left no record of him, probably because they were casual acquaintances, but the Alumni Cantabrigienses lists a student named Henry Anthony Adamson (1871–1941), who matriculated to Trinity College in 1889 and received his BA in 1892 and his MA in 1896.6 He profoundly changed Crowley’s life by introducing him to the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). For Crowley the budding poet, Shelley’s lyrical style and unique expressive language represented the perfect marriage of poetry and music. This was indeed a far cry from Plymouth devotional verse.
Realizing he had never read real poetry before, Crowley lost all interest in history, geography, and botany. He stopped studying altogether, voraciously consuming whatever poetry and literature he could find: in addition to poets like Robert Browning and Algernon Swinburne, he also devoured the works of writers like playwright William Shakespeare, satirist Jonathan Swift, essayist Thomas Carlyle, novelist Henry Fielding, historian Edward Gibbon, and adventurer-scholar Sir Richard Burton. “I was influenced by Ruskin’s7 imbecile remark that any book worth reading was worth buying, and in consequence acquired books literally by the ton.”8 Before long, floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined his apartment. Shelley nevertheless remained Crowley’s lifelong favorite,9 influencing not only his writing but also his emulative passion for life.
Aleister Crowley as a young poet. (photo credit 2.1)
By 1896, AC was wearing a poet’s silk shirt with floppy hat and bow tie, constantly writing poetry. Everything—even campus landmarks—inspired a Shelleyan passion in his own lyrical soul.
My poetic instincts, further, transformed the most sordid liaisons into romance … I found, moreover, that any sort of satisfaction acted as a powerful stimulus. Every adventure was the direct cause of my writing poetry.10
His verse frequented Cambridge’s student publications The Granta, Cambridge Magazine, and Cantab.11 Fortunately when one of Crowley’s instructors, Greek scholar Arthur Woollgar Verrall (1851–1912), confronted him about his absence from lecture and heard his student explain his newfound love for English literature, Verrall allowed him to pursue this interest unimpeded.
AC spent his 1896 winter vacation alone, sometimes secluded in the mountains and sometimes enjoying the long nights and cold clear air of northwestern Europe. “I loved to wander solitary in Holland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. There was a mystery in the streets and a spontaneous gaiety in the places of amusement, which satisfied my soul.”12 Over Easter, he was one of thirty-two members of the Scottish Mountaineering Club in Fort William for a wet and rainy meet.13 In the end he returned to Britain’s sea cliffs at Wastdale Head. There he reunited with Norman Collie, who had mentored Crowley’s Alpine climbs the previous summer. He was back from his tragic Himalayan climb in which A. F. Mummery (who had skeptically received AC’s correspondence about Beachy Head) was killed. Crowley and Collie’s reunion was nevertheless happy; together they demonstrated the puttees that Collie had brought back from Nanga Parabat. These leather leggings, secured by winding laces around the calf, were handy for keeping snow out of one’s boots. Also at this time, John Wilson Robinson (c. 1853–1907),14 who pioneered climbing in Cumbria’s lake district, showed AC some of Wastdale Head’s easier climbs; snowy gales prevented more difficult ascents. AC commemorated these climbs with the poem “A Spring Snowstorm in Wastdale.”15
That summer he also returned to the Bernese Oberland, making the first guideless ascent of the Mönch (13,474 feet) on July 14, commemorated in his poem “A Descent of the Moench.”16 Other solo unguided ascents at this time included the Aiguille de la Za (12,051 feet); Aiguilles Rouges d’Arolla (11,929 feet), immortalized in his poem “The Traverse of Aiguilles Rouges”;17 and the Vuibez Séracs, an icefall that had probably never before been passed. Crowley would later attribute this last accomplishment to his “quite uncanny faculty” to “divine the one possible passage through the most complex and dangerous icefall.”18 In addition, he and a companion made an unguided ascent of the Trifthorn (12,231 feet), as well as a new descent down its northwest face.19
Despite his literary interests, Crowley took Cambridge’s honors examination (the Moral Science Tripos) and tentatively chose the diplomatic service as his profession. His training included an 1897 stint learning Russian in St. Petersburg. Uninspired by the experience, he stopped on his return trip to attend a chess congress in Berlin. The roomful of stodgy old masters convinced him that chess, despite his own skill and passion for the game, could be nothing more than a hobby for him—albeit one he would enjoy through his last days. He came to the same realization about mountaineering—during 1897 he climbed the Pic Coolidge (12,385 feet), crossed the Brèche de la Meije (11,014 feet), returned to the Aiguille de la Za, and traversed Mont Collon (11,932 feet)20—and his educational options looked no more promising.
These observations culminated in an existential crisis in October 1897. Although death had been omnipresent ever since his childhood struggle with albuminuria, now he pondered: what would he have to show for his lifelong struggle when he died? Would his career in the diplomatic service be quickly forgotten like that of most politicians? What use was his beloved poetry when his Cambridge peers had never heard the name Aeschylus? And even if he succeeded as a great politician or poet—a Caesar or Shakespeare—his eminence would eventually perish with the death of mankind.
Crowley determined to “find a material in which to work which is immune from the forces of change,”21 concluding that only spiritual pursuits had eternal implications. Then and there he renounced the diplomatic service in favor of the spirit. Over thirty years later, asked why he did not seek fame, Crowley would reply cryptically, “Who was our representative at the Sublime Porte, say, eight years ago?”
Crowley’s experience of the First Noble Truth, however, was not that simple, as evidenced by another major awakening in his life.
A year earlier—in December 1896—Crowley had been in Stockholm during the Christmas holiday. There, at midnight of New Year’s Eve, he joined what he called the Military Order of the Temple. As he later described it:
I was awakened to the knowledge that I possessed a magical means of becoming conscious of and satisfying a part of my nature which had up to that time concealed itself from me. It was an experience of horror and pain, combined with a certain ghostly terror, yet at the same time it was the key to the purest and holiest spiritual ecstasy that exists.22
Crowley was never one to mince words about his mystical experiences, and the couched euphemisms of this passage recall the polite if incomprehensible description of contracting venereal disease that he gives in The World’s Tragedy. It appears that the “Military Order of the Temple” was a euphemism for Crowley’s awakening to his bisexuality, simultaneously stirring up feelings of horror from his upbringing along with quiescent relief. His poem “At Stockholm” addresses a secret forbidden love:
We could not speak, although the sudden glow
Of passion mantling to the crimson cheek
Of either, told our tale of love, although
We could not speak.23
He wrote of events at this time that he “Hunted new Sins till October, ’97, when one of them turned to bay, and helped me to experience the ‘Trance of Sorrow.’ ”24 Similar reference to sin appears in an early poem from this period:
He who seduced me first I could not forget.
I hardly loved him but desired to taste
A new strong sin. My sorrow does not fret
That sore. But thou, whose sudden arms embraced
My shrinking body, and who brought a blush
Into my cheeks, and turned my veins to fire,
Thou, who didst whelm me with the eager rush
Of the enormous floods of thy desire,
Thine are the kisses that devour me yet,
Thine the high heaven whose loss is death to me,
Thine all the barbed arrows of regret,
Thine on whose arms I yearn to be
In my deep heart thy name is writ alone,
Men shall decipher—when they split the stone.25
This “new strong sin” was his friendship with H. C. J. Pollitt.
Herbert Charles Pollitt (1872–1942) was the son of Westmorland Gazette proprietor Charles Pollitt (born c. 1837) of Thorny Hills, Kendal, and his wife Jane, née Hutchinson (c. 1837–1892).26 Born on July 20, 1871, he, like Crowley, was a gentleman of leisure owing to his family’s fortune and, around the time of their October 1897 meeting, took the Christian name Jerome, by which he preferred to be called. He had matriculated to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1889, receiving his BA in 1892 and his MA in 1896. Although he failed to qualify as a doctor, he later appeared in London’s 1901 census as a “medical servant, own means” and would go on to serve during the Great War as a Lance-Corporal in the Royal Army Medical Corps, entering the 9159th regiment on August 27, 1914.27
Perdurabo Page 6