Perdurabo

by Richard Kaczynski

  The aspirant is confronted by real trouble—that is, if he really wishes to become good; for he is compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses—“expert witnesses”—who are all quite, or nearly quite, as ignorant of mountain craft as the veriest beginner, and are Great Authorities on Climbing and Mountaineering. Climbing is, as far as I know, the only sport in which the absolute humbug can reign supreme without instant exposure.…

  Believe nothing that is told you about mountain craft, unless you have absolute proof that a real expert is speaking. If a soi-disant “Authority” tells you that no man can walk up an ice slope of 60 degrees without cutting steps; that no one can see a crevasse when it is covered with snow; that guides are vastly superior to amateurs; believe him not. Go and try for yourself; if you find you cannot do any of these things, find some one who can, and then take his statements for gospel …

  How, you will ask, are you to distinguish this sublime person at sight? Thus. Ask him if he uses claws; if he is better than most first-class Swiss guides; if he can sit on one leg on a smooth hard ice slope of 70 degrees without a step having been cut; if he has led on more than six good guideless expeditions in the Alps (successful ones!); if he is a better rock-climber than almost any guide he ever met—he must answer “Yes” to all these queries and be prepared to provide his words, or he is a beginner in the Art.93

  This article gives a good glimpse of what training with Eckenstein must have been like for Crowley. Indeed, this maverick instructor even acknowledged his protégé’s unconventional technique: “For example, the outer pinnacle of the Devil’s Chimney at Beachy Head was only climbed with the assistance of a definite pull from an unshaven chin!”94

  Perhaps what was difficult for the club to bear was that these dissident climbers were good. Competent and respected Eckenstein struck out on his own; under his wing was the outspoken and independent Crowley, who, after astonishing everyone by climbing Beachy Head, proceeded to set other climbing records both on the Alps and on Britain’s sea cliffs. Arnold Lunn (1888–1974)—British skier, Alpine Club president, and creator of the alpine slalom race—reluctantly admitted they were both technically excellent climbers,95 and mountaineer Thomas George Longstaff, after a demonstration of the new crampons on August 24, called Crowley

  a fine climber, if an unconventional one. I have seen him go up the dangerous and difficult right (true) side of the great icefall of the mer de Glace below the Géant alone, just for a promenade. Probably the first and perhaps the only time this mad, dangerous and difficult route had been taken.96

  During free moments on the glacier, Crowley studied S. L. MacGregor Mathers’s (1854–1918) The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887), which he had been reading since July. It was a translation of Knorr von Rosenroth’s (d. 1689) Latin tome Kabbala Denudata (1677–1684), itself a translation of that classic of Hebrew mystic literature, The Zohar. Crowley recognized a wealth of information in the book but could not grasp it. For that reason it intrigued him even more. He pined increasingly for the teacher he had prayed for at Wastdale. Little did he realize that Eckenstein had brought him to just the right place.

  In August 1898, Crowley descended the glacier for a much needed break, packing up his book and staying in the village of Zermatt. There, the impetuous student of mysticism found himself in a beer hall one night discussing alchemy. Having passed Cambridge’s special exam in chemistry with a second class, Crowley felt himself quite the expert in present company, and lectured with cocksureness. He was wrong. After the discussion, a man introduced himself to Crowley as Julian L. Baker, analytical chemist. Baker recognized a well-read and sincere student of the mysteries beneath AC’s arrogant exterior and discussed the fine points of alchemy while escorting Crowley back to his hotel.

  Science records the name of Julian Levett Baker (1873–1958) as an English chemist, educated at the City of London School until a bout of scarlet fever over Easter 1888 prevented his return. His father arranged for academic coaching, and Baker passed the next entrance exam to Finsbury Technical College, where he studied chemistry for three years (because he was so young at entry, they kept him an extra year beyond the customary two). In 1891, at age nineteen, he became assistant chemist—and later chief chemist—to the London Beetroot Sugar Association under Arthur Robert Ling (1861–1937), future professor of brewing at Birmingham, with whom he collaborated.97 In April 1899, Baker was proposed as a fellow of the Society of Public Analysts;98 he was also a fellow of the Imperial College and of the Chemical Society.99 In 1900 he became the first chemist appointed to a London brewery—the Stag Brewery at Pimlico, operated by Watney, Combe, Reid and Co. Ltd.—where he would remain until his retirement forty-six years later.100 Indeed, he is best known for his contributions to brewing chemistry—an interesting coincidence given the Crowley family’s roots. Baker became honorary secretary of the London section of the Society of Chemical Industry in 1905, where his responsibilities included the program of its ambitious annual meetings.101 As a founding member of the Institute of Brewing, he also authored The Brewing Industry (1905), followed by his chapter on “Malt and Malt Liquors” in Allen’s Commercial Organic Analysis (1909), and the article on “Fermentation” in Encyclopædia Britannica (1911).102 He quickly established a reputation as “one of the foremost English exponents of brewing chemistry.… In him are combined two attributes which are seldom found together, namely a finely trained and rigidly scientific mind with practical knowledge and action.”103

  Baker would author some fifty papers over his career. He would also serve his profession as honorary secretary of the Institute of Brewing (1908–1918), followed by a forty-year term as its vice president; publication committee member for the Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry; editor of The Analyst (1907–1920) and Journal of the Institute of Brewing (1920–1949); and an examiner in brewing to both the City and Guilds of London Institute (1908–1911) and the University of Birmingham (1928–1931). On November 6, 1924, he delivered the Streatfield Memorial Lecture at his alma mater, the Finsbury Technical College.104 Other career honors included his 1944 election to the City and Guilds of London Institute, and his 1948 receipt of the Horace Brown medal, the highest award of the Institute of Brewing.105 He was well known in the business; his colleague George Cecil Jones noted that, among a crowd of chemists, “Baker seems to know everyone here and everyone knows Baker.”106 Another colleague described him, “His character was essentially his own and he possessed an old world courtesy that was as charming as it was natural.”107

  In 1898, however, Baker was still a chemist with the Beetroot Sugar Association, where he discovered his interest in sugars and starches.108 Thus Crowley had just met the third of three climber-chemists with a mystical bent.

  Crowley sat in his room that night, pondering his luck. Baker was an alchemist, but was he the master he had asked for? If so, how ironic that fatigue and vanity were the devices of his discovery. Kismet, he decided: in the morning, he would ask Baker if he was a master.

  By the time Crowley asked after him, however, Baker had already left the hotel. AC frantically telegraphed all over the valley, desperate not to let his one link to the Sanctuary vanish. After searching the local hotels and railroad stations, he finally found Baker and told him of his search for the Secret Sanctuary. Then he asked the big one: “Are you a Master?”

  Baker smiled and shook his head. “No, but on our return to London, I’ll introduce you to a man who is much more of a magician than I.”

  His health declined throughout the summer, finally forcing Crowley to leave Eckenstein’s camp and return to London under a physician’s care. He took a room in the Cecil Hotel during his convalescence, writing the poetic play Jephthah and corresponding with Baker about the Secret Sanctuary.

  When Baker introduced Crowley to George Cecil Jones (1873–1960) that October, everything fell neatly into place. Jones was an industrial chemist of 58 Cliddesden Road, Basingstoke, who, like Baker, was still early in his career. Although Crowley calle
d him Welsh,109 Jones was actually born in Croydon, Surrey, on January 10, 1873.110 Educated from 1889 to 1893 at the City and Guilds of London Central Institute, he worked for eighteen months as assistant to the eminent London analytical chemists Messrs. Helbing and Passmore.111 From there, he transferred to the Dowson Economic Gas and Power Company, Basingstoke, in late 1894. At that time, he was also balloted and elected to the Chemical Society, and in 1896 became a member of the Society of Chemical Industry.112 In 1896 the Chemical News and Journal of Industrial Science listed him as one of eighteen alumni of the City and Guilds of London Institute “whose subsequent careers merit notice.”113

  In the years after meeting Crowley, Jones would work as managing chemist at Free, Rodwell & Co. Ltd.—maltsters of Misty, Essex—from 1902, then five years later start his own consulting practice, which he would run until his 1939 retirement. Other professional accomplishments include passing the Associate of the Institute of Chemistry’s branch “A” examination in mineral chemistry; serving on the London committee of the Society of Chemical Industry (for which Baker was secretary); nomination to the Society of Public Analysts and Other Analytical Chemists; and being an abstractor for The Analyst and an auditor for the Chemical Technology Examination Board.114 Over his career he authored a number of papers and reviews in trade journals like The Analyst and the Journal of the Institute of Brewing and Distilling.115 Along with Baker, he contributed to Allen’s Commercial Organic Analysis (1909), with chapters on “Alcohols,” “Wines and Potable Spirits,” and “Non-Glucosidal Bitter principles.”116 He also reported on the state of “Analytical Chemistry” in 1915.117

  Jones was known for his gentle, tolerant, and self-effacing character, his sound judgement, and moral courage.118 Slight and lean, with long hair, beard, and mustache, he looked like Jesus incarnate. “I am not an appreciator of poetry,” he told Crowley, “and I have no Keats”;119 but he was well read in magic, which he investigated empirically. Most medieval books on the subject, he explained, were purposely unintelligible to prevent the profane from penetrating their secrets. Only a proper instructor could decipher their meaning.

  Once a student was ready, Jones continued, he could contact a teacher in the manner described in the medieval book The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage; the process involved a six-month retirement from the cares of daily living, spent instead in constant prayer and meditation unto one’s holy guardian angel. Jones tipped Crowley to a modern translation and interpretation of the book that had just been published that February; the translator, coincidentally, was Samuel Liddell Mathers. AC instantly recognized this as the translator and expositor of that other mysterious and impenetrable tome, The Kabbalah Unveiled, and resolved to find a copy. Jones, like Baker, recognized Crowley’s vast magical potential and offered to introduce him to a body of initiates that could prepare him for the sacred magic of Abramelin.

  In response, Crowley secretly took a flat at 67 and 69 Chancery Lane under the identity of Count Vladimir Svareff. His reasons for adopting this outlandish pseudonym were twofold, as he explains:

  1) I had resolved to perform the operation of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. In that book, the aspirant is warned that his family will oppose his actions and seek to interfere. The assumption of this name was one of my precautions against any such nonsense.

  2) I had just come back from Russia, where I had been to learn the language for the Diplomatic Service, and I thought it would be fun to observe the reactions of Londoners to a foreign nobleman. It was.120

  Despite advice to wait, he dedicated two rooms to the sacred magic.

  Meanwhile, Baker and Jones taught Crowley the technique of astral projection. The practice resembles a controlled out-of-body experience, where one’s consciousness leaves its physical confines and travels in the imagination. The first step involved drawing a protective circle around one’s body, simultaneously preventing other entities from invading it and isolating the practitioner from ambient distractions. Next, the room was purged of undesirable energies by means of a formula called the Lesser Banishing Ritual. Prayer or meditation followed, and finally, projection. All visions were critically examined, tested, and recorded for agreement with known facts about the astral realm. Unusual as the technique was, it strove for the same systematic and empirical standards that made science possible.

  Crowley’s first experience was unusually vivid, and his second sight quickly surpassed Baker’s. In two months’ instruction, Crowley logged a total of eighteen visions, including attending a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth at Queen’s Hall. The visions, which survive in his diaries and were later partly published in The Equinox, are fascinating. One in particular merits description:

  Traveling down a long gold-purple column that opened into a scarlet cavern, the student found his astral body besieged by lost souls attempting to break through the protective barrier of his magic circle. Among these, he recognized Pollitt’s face. “Who are these?” Crowley asked.

  A voice said, “They are the souls of those whom thou hast caused to sin.”

  Truth or lie, it was an ugly sight. He raised an imaginary sword in outrage, and as he did, a hideous deformed giant lunged out of the shadows and threw its black form repeatedly at the circle. To AC’s disbelief, the barrier nearly yielded, and he prepared to smite the creature. But a voice interrupted and warned that the monster was his own evil persona, and he ought not to banish it.

  Although the magician commanded his persona to stop tormenting him, the shadow responded more furiously than before. The circle yielded dramatically, allowing the figure perilously close to Crowley, who was confused about how to react. Finally, he raised his magic sword, traced a protective pentagram between himself and his alter ego, and intoned the Tetragrammaton, or sacred four-lettered name of God: Yahweh. In response the hulk sullenly withdrew.

  Crowley mournfully considered his dark half, extended his left arm, and instructed the beast to kiss his hand and repent. However, the wary magician extended his hand only part way, and the monstrosity bent only slightly toward it. Aleister Crowley’s two sides confronted each other that night and could not meet halfway. That dark half would resurface over the years, presenting its ugly face at the most inopportune moments, leaving people with a demonic impression of AC. But for now, the astral traveler returned to his physical body.121

  His quick progress convinced Jones and Baker of both his sincerity and ability. They agreed: it was time Aleister Crowley joined the Order of the Golden Dawn.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Golden Dawn

  William Wynn Westcott (1848–1925) was a gentle, friendly man, born in Crowley’s hometown of Leamington. His life was like two parallel streams, flowing side by side but never crossing. One river was the medical profession, the other his spiritual journey. His father, the surgeon Peter Westcott of Oundle, died when Wynn was about ten, and he was subsequently raised by his uncle, Dr. Richard Westcott Martyn of Martock, Somerset. Following in the footsteps of his family, Westcott attended University College, London, passing the University of London’s second division MB exam in 1869, and on April 14, 1870, passing his exam at Apothecaries’ Hall to receive a certificate to practice medicine.1 By age twenty-three—four years before Crowley was born—he became a partner in his uncle’s medical practice in Martock, Somersetshire. Shortly thereafter, he married Eliza Burnett (c. 1851–1921), with whom he had five children.2 Beginning around 1883 he held the post of deputy coroner for central Middlesex and central London until he was appointed coroner of northeast London in 1894.3 In this capacity, he held over twenty-one inquests per week into deaths reported in his region4 until his 1918 retirement. His professional service included stints as president of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, vice president of the Medico-Legal Society, vice president of the National Sunday League, and councillor of the Coroners’ Society. Although he published professionally—authoring the book Suicide: Its History, Literature, Jurisprudence, Causation, and Preven
tion (1885) and the paper “Twelve Years’ Experience as a London Coroner” (1907) and coediting fifteen editions of The Extra Pharmacopoeia from its original 1883 publication5—the bulk of his literary output concerned the occult.

  Hermetic philosophy always fascinated Westcott, leading him to study kabbalah, alchemy, and Rosicrucianism. These pursuits led him in 1871—about the time he partnered with his uncle—to join the Parrett and Axe Masonic Lodge, over which he would preside as Worshipful Master in 1877. He also pursued the higher degree rites of Freemasonry, advancing to the Royal Arch and the Rose Croix degrees in 1873 and by 1878 reaching the thirtieth degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.6 On December 2, 1886, he was admitted to the prestigious Masonic research lodge, Quatuor Coronati; seven years later, in 1893, he was unanimously elected and installed in a one-year term as its master.7

  Dr. W. Wynn Westcott (1848–1925), cofounder of the Golden Dawn. (photo credit 3.1)

  Westcott also joined other initiatory organizations, both allied and irregular. On January 7, 1880—just before becoming Deputy Coroner—he joined London’s prestigious Rosicrucian fraternity, Societas Rosicruciana in Anglica (SRIA). He served as Supreme Grand Secretary of the Swedenborgian Rite, a hermetic revival of an earlier fraternal order based on the teachings of Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). And he joined the Esoteric Section of H. P. Blavatsky’s (1831–1891) Theosophical Society (TS). The results of his scholarly research into hermeticism took the form of several dozen contributions to Masonic journals Ars Quatuor Coronatorum and The Freemason, to the Transactions of the Metropolitan College of the SRIA, and to Theosophical journals The Theosophist, Lucifer, and Theosophical Siftings. He also wrote books like Numbers: Their Occult Power and Mystic Virtue (1890), translated the Sepher Yetzirah (1893) and The Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum (1896) into English, and cowrote and edited a series of ten monographs issued by the TS as Collectanea Hermetica (1893–1896).8