Perdurabo

by Richard Kaczynski

  Finally, even Crowley’s lifestyle fell under scrutiny. The older, staid members believed that a magician should abstain from sex, drink, and drugs to keep his mind clear, and Crowley’s libertine ways went against the grain on all counts. Under Bennett’s guidance, he drank and took all manner of drugs—the members could only guess which ones. And his promiscuity quickly became legend: gossip linked Crowley not only to Elaine Simpson but also to the Praemonstrix (acting head), Florence Farr, and even Bennett himself. Still others suggested that “he lived under various false names and left various districts without paying his debts.”27

  Yeats and Crowley should have gotten along, considering how much they had in common: the Celtic revival, magic, Decadence, and poetry.28 However, Crowley’s notoriety made him a difficult figure for Yeats to embrace when they met in the summer of 1899. As Crowley’s friend Gerald Yorke later recalled,

  Crowley objected to Yeats on the grounds that he had deserted the Great Work for literature. Yeats of Crowley that he had prostituted the Great Work and was a ‘Black Magician.’ Both verbally to me. I think they were both mistaken, but both had fairly legitimate reasons for their opinion.29

  Instead of becoming friends, circumstances made them rivals in three areas dear to their hearts: love, magic, and poetry.

  If there is but one iota of truth to the contention that they were rivals in “at least one romantic affair” 30—Florence Farr—this alone could have made them mortal enemies. Florence Beatrice Farr (1860–1917) was an early GD friend of Crowley’s, possibly through the astral projection study group she ran. The daughter of a successful doctor, she abandoned college at age eighteen to pursue an acting career. After an unsuccessful marriage to Edward Emery, she became George Bernard Shaw’s (1856-1950) mistress in 1889. She joined the GD a year later and, attracted to Yeats, found herself torn between two loves: Shaw and Yeats, drama and magic. She chose magic, attaining prominence in both the GD hierarchy and Yeats’s affections. Crowley possessed “affectionate respect tempered by a feeling of compassion”31 for her. Farr’s biographer maintains that, while “There is no doubt that Florence and ‘The Beast’ … shared some sort of rapport for a short while,”32 they were not romantically linked.

  Another rivalry—magic—posed an obstacle to friendship with Yeats. Long a close friend of Mathers, Yeats visited him and exchanged friendly correspondence after his move to Paris. Suddenly, a brash young upstart arrived, apparently brownnosing the order’s head. At the very least, Crowley became the friend to Mathers that Yeats felt he should have been.

  If Crowley is to be believed, Yeats was also jealous of his talent as a poet. While correcting the proofs to Jephthah; and Other Mysteries, Lyrical and Dramatic (1899), Crowley asked Yeats his opinion of the piece. Looking it over, Yeats replied politely, but Crowley detected rage and jealousy in his reply. If the critics are right, Crowley may have been somewhat correct: most reviewers received Jephthah with praise. The Manchester Guardian wrote, “If Mr. Swinburne had never written, we should all be hailing Mr. Aleister Crowley as a very great poet indeed,” while the Aberdeen Journal thought “He has caught the spirit in the style of Swinburne, and in some respects the pupil is greater than his master.”33 The Outlook effused:

  Mr. Aleister Crowley possesses uncommon gifts. As behoves a person so blest, he devotes himself to poesy. And there is no department of the sad mechanic exercise in which he fails of a kind of mastery. That is to say, his blank verse is almost unexceptionable; he will rhyme you fair sound rhymes from now to Candlemas; he is good at your strophe, your antistrophe, your chorus, your semi-chorus, your sonnet, your ode, your set of verses of all lengths; and he can build a pleasure-house of sweet words upon the inane.34

  Nevertheless, it would be Yeats, not Crowley, who would go on to win a Nobel prize for literature.

  Regardless of the reasons, these rivals in matters of love, magic and poetry strongly disliked each other. Yeats admitted Crowley was handsome, but suspected he was mad. “[W]e did not think a mystical society was intended to be a reformatory,” he wrote of Crowley.35 As a poet, Yeats felt Crowley had “written about six lines, amid much foul rhetoric, of real poetry.”36 Meanwhile, Crowley gave Irish writer George Moore (1852–1933) a book with the inscription: “You write of Yeats as ‘a poet in search of a pedigree’—but who told you he was a poet? Read ME!”37

  Accusations of black magic finally emerged from this rivalry. Crowley describes one incident in “At the Fork in the Roads” (1910):38 During the summer of 1899, AC was visited by Irish poet and artist Althea Gyles (1867–1949), who had drawn the cover of Yeats’s The Secret Rose (1897), Poems (1899), and The Wind among the Reeds (1899)39 and whose work Yeats praised:

  Miss Gyles’ images are so full of abundant and passionate life that they remind one of William Blake’s cry, “Exuberance is Beauty,” and Samuel Palmer’s command to the artist, “Always seek to make excess more abundantly excessive.” One finds in them what a friend, whose work has no other passion, calls “the passion for the impossible beauty” … [H]er inspiration is a wave of a hidden tide that is flowing through many minds in many places, creating a new religious art and poetry.40

  Despite being perceived as naive and spiritual—even Crowley remarked on “her steely virginal eyes”41—she was also working, and having an affair, with Leonard Smithers, much to the chagrin of her friends. Mackenzie, in her thinly disguised novel about Gyles, wrote that she,

  after treating reasonable admirers with prudish contempt, had fallen into the arms of an abominable creature of high intelligence, no morals, and the vivid imagination which was perhaps what she had been waiting for. He had the worst of reputations even among the Paris set. Ariadne lost caste, and when the affair ended after more than a year of heady intoxication, and with a certain amount of inspired work, she collapsed.42

  According to “At the Fork in the Roads,” after a discussion on clairvoyance, Gyles put on her coat to leave and, in so doing, inadvertently scratched Crowley with her brooch. The next day, when Crowley awoke feeling weak, Gyles admitted that Yeats was using black magic to destroy him. With Crowley, distinguishing fact from fancy in his fiction is nearly impossible; when he calls the account true in “every” detail, the claim wants for caution. It is unlikely Gyles gave Crowley such a confession; if she did, we don’t know if it was volunteered or extracted. Regardless, enough happened for Crowley to write of himself (in the third person):

  His house in London became charged with such an aura of evil that it was scarcely safe to visit it. This was not solely due to P[erdurabo]’s own experiments; we have to consider the evil work of others in the Order … who were attempting to destroy him. Weird and terrible figures were often seen moving about his rooms, and in several cases, workmen and visitors were struck senseless by a kind of paralysis and by fainting fits.43

  Similarly, Yeats claimed “Crowley has been making wax images of us all, and putting pins in them.”44

  Neither one of them imagined a real magical war would soon begin.

  “As life burns strong, the spirit’s flame grows dull,” Crowley wrote in his first book. Now the life flame of his spiritual beacon Allan Bennett was wracked by spasmodic asthma, was crumbling. Medicine had failed to cure him. Drugs had ceased to help. Something needed to be done.

  His only chance was to flee the “old grey country” of England in favor of a warm, dry climate … providing he lived long enough to move. Crowley and Jones recognized the failure of conventional avenues to cure their beloved Frater Iehi Aour, and journeyed down an alley they trusted more than the thoroughfares: magic. In an effort to prolong Bennett’s life enough for him to reach a healthier climate, Crowley and Jones turned to the Goetia.

  The temple was thick with dittany of Crete burning in the censer in the south. An acacia altar, twice as tall as it was square, sat within the protective circle. Outside the circle, the Triangle of the Art awaited the appearance of the summoned spirit. With everything prepared, they conjured Buer, an
infernal president who, according to the Goetia, “healeth all distempers in man.” It was a modest working, for Buer, although he commanded fifty legions of spirits, was but a president in rank: neither a king, duke, prince, prelate, nor marquis.

  As they conjured, they noticed the clouds of incense dispersing unevenly, hanging in clumps in the air. In places, the smoke became almost opaque. As Fratres Perdurabo and Volo Noscere proceeded, the room cleared of incense except around the censer, where it accumulated thick and heavy in a distinct pillar of smoke. A shape began materializing in the smoke. With their apparent success, the magicians proceeded to the “Stronger and More Potent Conjuration” from the Goetia, which caused parts of the figure to grow vaguely distinct. They made out a helmet, part of a tunic, and solid footgear.

  It was all wrong. It contradicted the Goetia’s description of Buer. Crowley and Jones shot glances at each other, and decided against learning what they had inadvertently summoned. Before the materialization completed, they banished and closed the temple.

  Foyers was just another vacation for Crowley, an opportunity to scale the rocks overlooking Loch Ness. He reposed on the north side of the Loch, across from the ruins of Urquhart Castle, one of Scotland’s largest castles until it was bombed in 1692 to prevent the Jacobites from using it. Conquering cliff after cliff, rock after rock, Crowley reached the pinnacle of an outcropping and looked down at the countryside. Precipitous rocks juxtaposed hills of heather. The earth sloped up gently from the Loch. A larch- and pine-covered hillock filled one spot; upon its mound he saw a house.

  Named Boleskine, it was a huge one-story lodge, built in the late eighteenth century by the Honourable Archibald Fraser (1736-1815) and passed through the Fraser family ever since. The manor boasted a pillared entranceway and terrace, a large formal garden, lodge, stable, boat house, and sacred well. It overlooked the Fraser burial grounds, a seventeenth-century graveyard enclosed by a spear-tipped wrought-iron fence. A long driveway wound away from the house, through low-hanging trees, and toward the road that led to Foyers, 1.5 miles south, and Inverness, eighteen miles north. The house, he thought, was perfect for the Abramelin operation. The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage stipulated that one’s oratory have windows opening onto an uncovered terrace, plus a lodge to the north. The building met these requirements.

  “I must have it,” he thought.

  He rang the owner, Mary Rose Burton, and explained his interest. She told him Boleskine was not for sale. He insisted he must have it, and offered her £2,000—twice its market value.45 She said it was a deal. By November, Boleskine was Crowley’s.

  Boleskine, Crowley’s home on Loch Ness. (photo credit 3.4)

  In the time between Boleskine’s discovery and sale, Crowley kept busy with magic and poetry. He eagerly discussed magic with Gerald Kelly, and one letter on the subject is particularly illuminating in light of his later philosophy of the True Will:

  Conjure up the image of your father in your mind’s eye. When you have got him standing before you almost as solid as if you were there, say, ‘I will go to A.C. at Boleskine, Foyers, Iverness’ in the most determined voice. Let every incident of the day remind you of your will, and devote any spare moment to the imagination formula as well. In a very few days of this, interspersed with frequent letters home stating your will, will certainly have the desired effect.46

  On Halloween 1899, Kelly became Frater Eritis Similis Deo (“You will be like God”) on his introduction to the GD G. C. Jones sponsored Kelly, as he had Crowley. Kelly found Jones sincere and likable; however, unimpressed by its other members, Kelly never advanced beyond the grade of Neophyte.

  In November, Mathers authorized Crowley to act as his London agent concerning publication and distribution of his Abramelin translation. Around this same time, AC also arranged to publish five hundred copies of his own An Appeal to the American Republic (1899). Reviews of this twelve-page booklet are not preserved, but the poem was later reprinted in The English Review. He also wrote an essay on the magical significance of numbers; though never published in his lifetime, this fragment represents his first paper on a magical subject.

  A happy homeowner, Crowley plunged more than ever into the trappings of his Scottish surroundings. He took long walks over the moors, hunted red deer and grouse, and called himself Laird Boleskine. On the edges of his land, he hung signs reading “Beware of the Ichthyosaurus!” and “The Dinotheriums are out today!”47 Taking the lead of his GD mentor, he also donned the red plaid kilt of the MacGregor tartan, and affected the name Aleister MacGregor.

  With the perfect place in which to retire for the Abramelin operation, he was ready to advance through the portal from the First Order to the Second Order of the GD. He thus applied to the Second Order with all eagerness and sincerity. Their refusal stunned him. Crowley was being made an example for the order. It was nothing personal, as Farr liked Crowley and, several years later, would defend him in the New Age; but she deemed Crowley unfit. It was an example of Farr playing the part of Praemonstrix, “a role which she assumed with occasional outrageous officiousness.”48

  Some time between the ritual for Bennett’s health and Crowley’s rejection by the Second Order, Crowley received another in a series of plaintive letters from one of his lovers. Lilian Horniblow was the wife of Colonel Frank Herbert Horniblow of the Royal Engineers, who was stationed in India at this time.49 The affair ended when Perdurabo devoted himself to the Abramelin operation and observed the spiritual and physical conditions of abstinence. She pleaded to see him again and invited him to her hotel. Although he had dismissed her previous requests, he agreed to this one because he had a plan.

  He arrived at her room, confronted her coolly, and told her: “You are making a mess of your life by your selfishness. I will give you a chance to do an absolutely unfettered act. Give me £100. I won’t tell you whom it’s for, except that it’s not for myself. I have private reasons for not using my own money in this matter. If you give me this, it must be without hoping or expecting anything in return.”50 Crowley’s private reasons are curious: Bennett needed £100 to leave England. Crowley refused to give the money himself not out of greed but because he feared the transaction would ruin their friendship. Although Crowley provided Bennett with free room and board, he did so in exchange for lessons in magic. Thus both parties retained their dignity.

  One hundred pounds. His mistress pondered, and handed it over. Crowley took it and beat a hasty retreat from her life.

  The Buddhist monasteries were Bennett’s destination. Magic was useless to him there, so on his departure he gave his GD notes to Crowley.51 Then he was gone. On Bennett’s departure, AC wrote:

  O Man of Sorrows: brother unto Grief!

  O pale with suffering, and dumb hours of pain!

  O worn with Thought! thy purpose springs again

  The Soul of Resurrection: thou art chief

  And lord of all thy mind: O patient thief

  Of God’s own fire! What mysteries find fane

  In the white shrine of thy white spirit’s reign,

  Thou man of Sorrows: O, beyond belief!52

  Meanwhile, Crowley’s jilted mistress had more than a cold shoulder in mind when she handed over £100 for mysterious purposes. When all she received was a hurried thank-you, she protested. Word got around, and that January, Laird Boleskine invited her to stay at his new home. He offered to pay her expenses as compensation for the money in dispute. She accepted and made the journey.

  No doubt precipitating this invitation, Horniblow had warned Crowley that he was about to find himself in what he, in his diary, referred to as “Great Trouble.” The nature of this trouble varies: one account has Horniblow complaining to the police about her loss of £100, and some of Yeats’s letters (quoted below) support this theory. Another connects this to Crowley’s relationship with Pollitt back at Cambridge. Supporting this homosexual scandal theory, he received two letters on January 15, 1900, warning that the police were watching him an
d his friends at 67 Chancery Lane because of something related to the “brother of a college chum.”53 When refused entry into the GD’s Second Order, the reason was suspicion of “sex intemperance on Thomas Lake Harris lines in order to gain magical power—both sexes are here connoted.”54 Indeed, both scandals may have come into play.

  That night, Crowley continued on to Paris and visited Mathers. On Tuesday, January 16, Mathers initiated him into the grade of Adeptus Minor (5°=6°), the first grade of the GD’s Second Order. While the First Order was known as the Order of the Golden Dawn in the Outer, the Second Order was called the Rosea Rubea et Aurea Crucis (Ruby Rose and Cross of Gold).

  Like all GD initiations, this one involved dramatic ritual. It drew heavily upon Rosicrucian symbolism and Mathers’s connections with the SRIA. The initiate was instructed by officers, then dressed in a black Robe of Mourning and draped with the Chain of Humility. Next, he was tied to the Cross of Suffering, and took the following tenfold oath:

  (1) I, [the candidate’s motto is used here], a member of the body of Christ, do this day, on behalf of the Universe, spiritually bind myself, even as I am now bound physically unto the Cross of Suffering:

  (2) That I will do the utmost to lead a pure an unselfish life.