Perdurabo

by Richard Kaczynski

  In 1887, Westcott discovered in the musty SRIA library an old manuscript written in cipher. Decoding its contents, he discovered ritual fragments and the address of Fräulein Anna Sprengel, a German Rosicrucian adept. Writing her, he was surprised to receive authorization to start an English branch of the esoteric school known as “Die Goldene Dämmerung,” thus marking the inception of the Golden Dawn (GD), the organization that counted England’s intelligentsia amongst its members. This, at least, is the legend.

  Whatever the origin of the Cipher Manuscript, the Isis-Urania branch (or, formally, Temple) of the GD was founded in 1888. Like the other societies he had encountered, the GD espoused no particular religious belief, merely transmitting knowledge gained from comparative study of religion and philosophy the world over. Westcott invited two SRIA associates—W. R. Woodman and Samuel Liddell Mathers—to form the ruling triumvirate.

  Dr. W. R. Woodman (1828–1891) was a retired physician twenty years Westcott’s senior. He had also studied kabbalah, Egyptian antiquities, gnosticism, philosophy, astrology, alchemy, and tarot. Having begun as SRIA’s secretary in 1867, he advanced in eleven years to the post of supreme magus. Upon his death in 1891 (three years after founding the GD), Westcott would succeed him as SRIA’s head.

  Samuel Liddell Mathers (1854–1918) was the most colorful of the GD’s founders. Born in Hackney, he was the son of commercial clerk William M. Mathers. His father died young, and his mother raised him alone at Bournemouth. After her death in 1885 he moved to London. As an adult he maintained a firm athletic build from boxing and fencing. He also spent countless hours in the British Museum reading room, studying both magic and warfare. He joined the SRIA around 1877, where he met both Woodman and Westcott. In 1887—while Westcott was reputedly deciphering the Cipher Manuscript—he published The Kabbalah Unveiled, a translation of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s treatise on the Zohar, Kabbala Denudata (1677–1684), prefaced with his own exposition on the subject. He dedicated the book to Anna Kingsford (1846–1888), past president of the London TS and one of the first English women to obtain a degree in medicine; highly influenced by her and her book The Perfect Way (1882), Mathers became a staunch vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist.9 At the reading room, Mathers made two friends who would become major players in the GD saga: Mina Bergson and W. B. Yeats.

  Mina Bergson (1865–1928) was the younger sister of Nobel Prize–winning philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941).10 A sweet, attractive woman with springy hair and blue eyes, she was a London art student by age fifteen. She met Mathers in 1888 while studying Egyptian art at the British Museum. The mysterious scholar, eleven years her senior, fascinated her, and they wed two years later. She called him Zan, after the protagonist in Bulwer-Lytton’s mystic novel Zanoni (1842). He called her Moïna, his Highland redaction of her name.

  William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) placed mysticism second in his life only to poetry. By 1887 he had joined Kingsford’s Hermetic Students and, between 1889 and 1890, organized the Esoteric Section of the TS. He met Mathers in the British Museum reading room around 1889, and came to idolize the man he later characterized as having “much learning” but “little scholarship.”11 Yeats split with the Theosophists because they discouraged the practice of magic; on March 7, 1890, he joined the GD.

  Golden Dawn cofounder Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918) in 1911. (photo credit 3.2)

  After losing his job in London and moving to Paris with his wife, Mathers became increasingly eccentric. Rekindling his childhood love of Celtic symbology, he adopted all its trappings: He claimed descent from the clan MacGregor, the name of which had been suppressed under penalty of death and in 1603 changed to Mathers. He adopted pseudonyms like Comte de Glenstrae, Comte MacGregor, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor; rode his bicycle through the Paris streets in full Highland dress; and reputedly performed the sword dance with a knife in his stocking. Back in London, rumor had it Mathers believed himself to be the reincarnation of Scottish wizard king James IV.

  That same year, Woodman died; with Westcott succeeding him as supreme magus of the SRIA, he essentially became a silent partner in the GD. This left Mathers as de facto head of the order, and he seized the opportunity to assert his dominance, claiming direct contact with the Secret Chiefs—those mysterious and disembodied masters who ran the order—and managing the London temple from Paris.

  When high-ranking members tired of answering to an invisible hand, Mathers responded with a pronunciamento dated October 29, 1896: the Secret Chiefs had appointed him supreme ruler of the GD; as such, Mathers demanded all members sign and return to him an oath of loyalty. He would meet all refusals with expulsion.

  Ousted in the shakedown was high-ranking member Annie Horniman. The wealthy daughter of a tea merchant, her £200 annual stipend to Mathers was the only thing standing between his obscure translations—such as The Sacred Book of Abramelin the Mage—and poverty. The expulsion, of course, meant the end of his allowance. Many of the London temple’s 323 members were outraged by Horniman’s suspension and assembled a petition to reinstate her. Mathers refused to yield.

  Coincidentally, matters forced Westcott to further distance himself from the GD at this time. Within days of Mathers’s last visit to London, Westcott’s employers confronted him: someone (in retrospect, presumably Mathers or an ally) had left a GD instructional paper on a carriage with Westcott’s name and business address on it. Learning of Westcott’s outside interests, his superiors told him, “A coroner should bury bodies, not dig them up.” Westcott gladly pulled back from the order, finding Rosicrucians much easier to deal with than ceremonial magicians.

  In this agitated political environment, Crowley found himself a Neophyte.

  A member of that ages-old college of occultism described by Eckartshausen, Perdurabo set out to learn all he could. Upon entering the grade of Neophyte (cryptically denoted 0°=0°, where the first digit represented the grade and the second digit the corresponding position on the Hebrew Tree of Life), he discovered that, like any other school, the GD contained grades through which students passed after examination. Four grades awaited: the Zelator (1°=10°), Theoricus (2°=9°), Practicus (3°=8°), and Philosophus (4°=7°); then he would enter the Portal grade to the mysterious Second Order.

  His first lessons as an occultist gravely disappointed him. They were neither new nor arcane. His teachers asked him to learn the Hebrew alphabet, the 10 spheres or sephiroth of the Hebrew Tree of Life, and the attribution of the seven planets to the seven days of the week. The secrets he swore to keep inviolable were trivia he had already known for months, gleaned from countless other books of magic. Jones and Baker were supportive, advising him not to judge the GD until he reached the Second Order.

  Equally disappointing was the order’s membership. Expecting to encounter spiritual giants, he discovered a group of nonentities. Crowley was not alone in this opinion. GD member and Irish feminist Maud Gonne (1866–1953) characterized the order as “the very essence of British middle-class dullness. They looked so incongruous in their cloaks and badges at initiation ceremonies.”12 Even Jones called it “a club, like any other club, a place to pass the time and meet one’s friends.”13 Despite these views, the GD attracted its share of luminaries. Over the years, it claimed among its membership authors Arthur Machen (1863–1947) and Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951); the aforementioned poet W. B. Yeats and his uncle George Pollexfen; and Constance Mary Wilde (1859–1898), wife of Oscar Wilde. In addition to these better-known names, the GD also hosted men of learning, including chemists (Baker and Jones), physicians (Westcott, Woodman, Bury, Berridge, Felkin, and others), and occult scholars (Waite, Mathers, Bennett). In 1898, Dr. Bury even invited Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) to join, but he declined.

  Despite his protestations, Crowley’s initiation deeply impressed him. He wrote the poem “The Neophyte”14 about the experience and, like Yeats, would forever after show its influence in his writing and life.

  Jezebel and Oth
er Tragic Poems (1898)15 was a twenty-three-page booklet with a vellum wrapper, privately printed at the Chiswick Press with twelve copies on vellum and forty on handmade paper. Published under his Russian pseudonym of Vladimir Svareff,16 it featured an introduction and epilogue by Aleister Crowley and a dedication to his Cambridge friend Gerald Kelly.

  While Crowley had an excellent printer in the Chiswick Press, he had no way to distribute and sell his books. Smithers introduced him to the London firm of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Company, printers and booksellers, and he chose them to sell his next book, Tale of Archais (1898). Appearing in January 1899, the edition consisted of one hundred copies which sold for five shillings apiece. One-fourth of the print run was sent out for reviews, which ranged from “a certain command of facile rhythm” to “spurious romanticized mythology.”17 As early as 1905, Crowley regretted publishing the piece.18 Later, Crowley recalled it as “simply jejune; I apologize.”19

  Songs of the Spirit (1898) continued Crowley’s association with Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner and Company. Although Crowley contracted this edition around December 1898, it appeared after Tale of Archais. Finishing at 109 pages, AC dedicated the volume to Julian L. Baker in gratitude for introducing him to the GD. He issued one copy on vellum and fifty signed, besides the print run of three hundred. This mixed bag of poems, largely dating from 1897, garnered mixed reviews from the press. While the Manchester Guardian admired its intense spirituality and technical superiority, the Athenaeum considered it to be “difficult to read, and where they touch definite things, more sensual than sensuous.”20 The Outlook called Crowley “a poet of fine taste and accomplishment” and his book “contains much that is beautiful.”21 By the end of the year, half the print run had sold.

  Realizing how easy it was to publish his poetry, Crowley continued turning it out as quickly as the presses could print it.

  A cold chill filled the room, but not because it was January. Magical energy charged the temple, but not because of the ritual. No, it was that haggard man with dark wild eyes that put everything out of sorts. AC didn’t know who he was but felt his unsettling energy throughout the ceremony. Crowley anxiously disrobed in the changing room, anticipating a lungful of open air.

  As he adjusted his floppy silk bow tie, his heart pounded with the sound of approaching footsteps. The man pierced him with his eyes. He had a thick brow and an almost fanatical gaze. If not for his pallor and the physical suffering exuded by his presence, he might have been handsome. For now, Crowley found him intimidating. “Little Brother,” he observed, “you have been meddling with the Goetia.”

  Crowley stared into his burning eyes, transfixed. “No, I haven’t.” It was a lie. He had been playing with magical tomes like Abramelin and the Goetia or Key of Solomon ever since he moved into his Chancery Lane flat. Just the other night, he and Jones watched as semimaterialized figures and shadows paraded endlessly around the temple.

  “In that case,” the man continued, “the Goetia has been meddling with you.” Then he was gone again.

  The figure was Frater Iehi Aour (“Let there be light”), affectionately known as the White Knight after Through the Looking-Glass. GD members ranked him second only to Mathers as a magician. They told the story of how, at a party, someone ridiculed the notion of a blasting wand as described in medieval texts on magic; Iehi Aour took offense, produced a long glass prism, and pointed it at the offender. Fourteen hours later, doctors revived the skeptic.

  Other gossip described an altercation about Hinduism between Mathers and Iehi Aour. Mathers had rejected Frater IA’s contention that, by calling upon Shiva, one could cause the god to open his eyes and thereby destroy the world. To prove his point, IA plopped down on the floor of Mathers’s living room in lotus position and began chanting, “Shiva, Shiva, Shiva …” Mathers, already agitated by the argument, stormed out of the room. Returning half an hour later to find his guest still at it, he erupted, “Will you stop blaspheming?” The mantra continued. Mathers drew his revolver. “If you don’t stop, I’ll shoot you.” The mantra continued. Moïna entered the room just in time to end the argument, saving not just the White Knight but also the universe.

  The man behind the legend of Frater Iehi Aour was Allan Bennett (1872–1923). Born Charles Henry Allan Bennett during the Franco-Prussian war, his widowed mother raised him a strict Catholic. According to Crowley, he led a sheltered life, still believing at age sixteen that angels brought babies to earth. When classmates showed him an obstetrics manual, he found the facts of human reproduction so offensive and degrading that he lost faith in a benevolent God and abandoned Catholicism. At eighteen he briefly experienced the yogic trance of Shivadarshana, wherein the entire universe is united and all sense of self annihilated. Although he knew nothing of yoga, the vision was so profound that he vowed, “This is the only thing worth while. I will do nothing else in all my life but find out how to get back to it.” Thus he dedicated himself to the study of Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. By 1894 he had joined the GD and performed many legendary ceremonies. In one of these, he created a talisman for rain that required water to work; he lost it in a sewer, and London had one of the wettest summers on record. By twenty-five his magical prowess was renowned throughout the order.

  Allan Bennett (1872–1923), Frater Iehi Aour. (photo credit 3.3)

  Like Baker and Jones, he was an analytical chemist. He was tall, but asthma had reduced him to a stoop. Opium, morphine, cocaine, and chloroform each rotated for two months as his antihistamine and inadvertently showed him the ability of certain drugs to open pathways to higher consciousness.

  Crowley was stunned to find Bennett living in a south London tenement with Charles Rosher, GD member, inventor, sportsman, and jack of all trades. Such a great scholar ought not to live in squalor, Crowley believed. Realizing that Bennett could teach him more in a month than anyone else could in five years, he proposed a solution: since he needed a teacher and Bennett needed a benefactor, the White Knight could share Crowley’s flat in exchange for lessons in magic. Bennett accepted, and under his tutelage, Crowley progressed rapidly. Possessing all the order’s papers, Bennett provided his acolyte with a preview of the material he would receive. He also demonstrated his infamous wand:

  With this he would trace mysterious figures in the air, and, visible to the ordinary eye, they would stand out in a faint bluish light. On great occasions, working in a circle and conjuring the spirits by great names … he would obtain the creature … in visible and tangible form. On one occasion he evoked [the angel] Hismael and through a series of accidents, was led to step out of the circle without effectively banishing the spirit. He was felled to the ground, and only recovered 5 or 6 hours later.22

  In private moments Bennett insisted, “There exists a drug whose use will open the gates of the World behind the Veil of Matter.” This introduced Crowley to the controlled use of drugs for mystical purposes.

  Theirs was one of the strongest friendships Crowley would ever know. He always spoke of Bennett with great respect. “There never walked a whiter man on earth,” Crowley described him. “A genius, a flawless genius.”23

  In the months following his initiation, Crowley advanced steadily through the GD’s grades, graduating to Zelator in December 1898; Theoricus in January 1899; and Practicus in February. After an obligatory three-month interval, Frater Perdurabo reached the highest grade in the GD’s hierarchy, Philosophus, in May 1899. He stood at the gates of the Second Order, where the great secrets of magic awaited. Soon he would advance to the Portal.

  It was time he met the head of the order, known in the First Order by the motto Frater ’S Rioghail Mo Dhream (“Royal is my tribe”), in the Second Order as Frater Deo Duce Comite Ferro (“With God as my leader and the sword as my companion”), and, in the mundane world, as Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. He and Crowley shared many common interests. Both were athletic. Both basked in the romance of the Celtic revival, inventing romantic lineages for themselves; Mathers of the cl
an MacGregor and Crowley from the family O’Crowley. Both were driven by aspirations to spiritual greatness, and both were scholars of recondite wisdom. Mathers saw great potential in Crowley and approved of Bennett’s accelerated instruction.

  By summer, Crowley was notorious in the order.

  In befriending Bennett and Mathers, he inspired suspicion, uneasiness, and envy among senior members. The best magicians in the order had taken him under their wings. Crowley was sharp, moving easily and briskly through the grades, and grew arrogant about his aptitude. Bennett, although respected, was also a figure of awe and, to some, fear; thus Crowley’s tutelage under the White Knight seemed darker still. Moreso, Perdurabo’s friendship with Mathers allied him in a camp where loyalties were quickly dividing. Mathers was increasingly viewed as a despot, and Crowley became guilty by association.

  Part of his bad reputation traced to his friendship with Elaine Simpson (b. 1875), known in the order as Semper Fidelis (“Always faithful”). Born in Kussowlie, West Bengal, she was the daughter of Rev. William Simpson and Alice (née Hall); Elaine’s grandfather was Sir John Hall (1824–1907), the prime minister of New Zealand from 1879 to 1882. Alice Simpson was born in Mahableshwar, India; the family’s temporary move to Germany during the 1860s “laid the foundation of the training in music and languages which enabled her later in life to become a musician of repute and a linguist of considerable fame.”24 In 1873 she married Rev. Simpson of the Indian Anglican Ecclesiastical Establishment, living with him for some time in India. The Simpsons had two daughters: Elaine was the eldest, while the younger daughter, Beatrice, would move to New York, where she would establish herself as an actress and poet under the stage name Beatrice Irwin.25 Both Alice and Elaine belonged to the order; although Crowley found Elaine charming, he had nothing nice to say about her mother, whom he described as “a horrible mother, a sixth-rate singer, a first-rate snob, with dewlaps and a paunch; a match-maker, mischief-maker, maudlin and muddle-headed.”26 The hard feelings stem from a rumor spread by Mrs. Simpson that Crowley had visited her daughter’s bedroom at night in astral form. Both Aleister and Elaine denied the charge (but a few years later it inspired an experiment between them).