Yeats and Hunter spent the rest of the day refusing as “name unknown” the flood of telegrams which arrived for “MacGregor.” This was interrupted at 1 o’clock by the arrival of a burly fellow who had been wandering the London streets for two hours trying to find 36 Blythe Road. Crowley had hired him outside Alhambra, a Leicester Square pub, for thirteen shillings four pence. The man had no idea why he was wanted there: he thought some sort of entertainment would be provided.
Later that day, the committee met and suspended Mathers, Berridge, and Mrs. and Miss Simpson from the Second Order. They further moved “no person shall be deemed to belong to the London branch who has not been initiated by that body in London.” It was a smack in Crowley’s face. The Mathers loyalists were unamused by their suspension. On Friday, April 20, Dr. Berridge (c. 1843–1923) replied to the committee upon learning of his expulsion:
I am in receipt of your note of yesterday in which you convey to me the decision of the self-appointed and unauthorised committee of your new Archaeological Association.
I have read it carefully but am at present unable to decide where impudence or imbecility is its predominant characteristic.
As I have never been a member of your new Society I cannot be suspended from such non-existent membership.72
The next day, the committee reached a decision about Mathers: if his accusations of forgery were true, then he was guilty of fraud. If he was lying, then he was guilty of slander against a brother of the order. In either case, Mathers’s word was worthless.
Even at this point the battle raged. Crowley summonsed Farr to appear before the police magistrate of the West London Police Court on April 27 on charges of “unlawfully and without just cause detaining certain papers and other articles, the property of the Complainant.”73 He wanted either the items returned or £15 remuneration. Appealing to friends in high places, the Second Order rebels hired as their representative Charles Russell, son of the Lord Chief Justice. Yeats feared his name would be dragged into the case and, awaiting the court hearing, wrote:
The case comes on next Saturday, and for a week I have been worried to death with meetings, law and watching to prevent a sudden attack on the rooms. For three nights I did not get more than 4½ hours sleep any night. The trouble is that my Kabbalists are hopelessly unbusinesslike and thus minutes and the like are in complete confusion.74
To their advantage, however, they learned Crowley had been blacklisted by the Trades’ Protection Association for a bad debt; so they called in a trade union representative to testify in their defense.
Cracknell sent a letter to Crowley’s counsel in an effort to clear matters up. She explained that Farr was president and Hunter treasurer of the order; Mathers acted only as honorary head, but had never been in 36 Blythe Road, let alone contributed financially to its upkeep. She also described how Crowley broke into the premises, adding, “certain things of pecuniary value to the society were found to be missing.”75
The day of the trial, Yeats—having just been elected the GD’s new leader—sat at home like an expectant mother, awaiting the news. He wrote to Lady Gregory:
I do not think I shall have any more bother for we have got things into shape and got a proper executive now and even if we lose the case it will not cause any confusion though it will give one Crowley, a person of unspeakable life, the means to carry on a mystical society which will give him control of the conscience of many.76
He finished and sealed the letter but, before he could mail it, the news arrived. They had won. Crowley’s solicitor, concluding they had no case, feared the GD would claim their losses exceeded £15, thus taking the case to a higher court. To avoid this complication, they withdrew charges for a £5 penalty.
Easter had passed, and it was thus too late for Crowley to resume the Abramelin operation. He returned to Boleskine for a few somber days, then returned to Mathers in Paris. Berridge, he learned, had joined Westcott to set up a new branch of Isis-Urania under Mathers’s direction.77 Evidently the controversy did not prevent Mathers and Westcott from collaborating.
During his visit, Crowley convinced Mathers to unleash the punitive current against the rebels. He thus spent a Sunday afternoon watching Mathers baptize dried peas in the names of the rebels and rattling them around inside a sieve. Crowley, unimpressed, recorded, “nobody seemed a penny the worse.”78
Thus ended the revolt in the GD, with Mathers believing he had been the victim of a conspiracy, and Yeats regretting the loss of a friend. Shortly after the break, Yeats recalled Mathers respectfully: “MacGregor apart from certain definite ill doings and absurdities … has behaved with dignity and even courtesy.”79 Years later, he recalled his old friend in a poem:
I call MacGregor Mathers from his grave,
For in my first hard spring-time we were friends,
Although of late estranged.
I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,
And told him so, but friendship never ends …80
In 1925 he fondly dedicated his book A Vision to Moïna. Although they parted bitterly, the Matherses’ influence upon him never faded.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Mountain Holds a Dagger
When Count and Countess MacGregor of Glenstrae stepped onto the stage of the Bodinière Theater in Paris, clothed in Egyptian raiment, they became the High Priest Rameses and the High Priestess Anari in public celebrations of the Rite of Isis. Beginning around October 1899, these public ceremonies involved both Rameses and Anari invoking the goddess Isis. A Parisian dancer in long white robes next performed invocations of the four elements: the danse des fleurs (earth), danse du miroir (water), danse de la chevelure (fire), and dance des parfums (air). Finally, offerings of flowers or wheat were thrown upon the altar by female and male attendees, respectively. “The ceremony was artistic in the extreme,” remarked reporter Frederick Lees. The object of these rites was to generate interest in their mystery school, and in this they were apparently successful: the receptions and celebrations hosted at their residence—“amongst the most interesting in Paris”—attracted “scientists, doctors, lawyers, painters, and men and women of letters, besides persons of high rank.”1
Crowley, while attending these rites, met American soprano Susan Strong (1870–1946). Born in Brooklyn, she inherited a fortune when her father, lawyer and former New York State Senator Demas Strong (1820–1893), died of heart failure on November 9, 1893. He had been part of the California gold rush in 1849 and, accumulating a fortune, returned home to Brooklyn and entered politics.2 With her older siblings married, Susan, aged twenty-two, moved to London and studied singing for her own amusement at the Royal Academy of Music under Hungarian composer and teacher Francis Korbay (1846–1913). Both her vocal and acting ability convinced Korbay that she could be a great diva, and he encouraged her to audition for the English Opera Company. Although she sang as Elsa in Lohengrin (1893), her big-stage debut at Covent Garden two years later as Sieglinde, in an English-language version of Die Walküre, made her an overnight star.3 The Academy called her performance “a veritable triumph,”4 while the Times raved, “artistic as her singing is it is thrown into the shade by her wonderful skill as an actress. Gifted with a fine physique and an unusually dignified stage presence, her command of beautiful and appropriate gesture is such as the most experienced singers rarely attain.”5 In a highly uncharacteristic gesture of appreciation noted by the Times, she was given numerous bouquets at the conclusion of the first act.
American soprano Susan Strong (1870–1946) in her breakout role as Sieglinde from Wagner’s Die Walküre. (photo credit 4.1)
Based on this performance, Strong was engaged for the 1896 season at Bayreuth, followed by her New York debut later that fall. In the years that followed she toured America and regularly returned to London. By the time Crowley met her, Strong’s repertoire had expanded to include the demanding roles of Marguerite (Gounod’s Faust, in 1896), Aïda (Verdi’s Aïda, in 1897–1898), Brünnhilde (Wagner’s Siegfried, in 18
98), Donna Anna (Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in 1900), Freïa (Wagner’s Das Rheingold, in 1900), and Gutrune (Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, in 1900). She originally performed as Venus at Covent Garden in Tannhäuser in June 1899, and reprised both the role and the venue in May–June 1900, which matches the time in which Crowley says he saw her portray Venus at Covent Garden.6
From her attending Mathers’s public ritual, one wonders to what degree she shared Crowley’s interest in the occult; indeed, AC identifies her as “a member of the Order.”7 She took him “by storm,” he punned, and a relationship sprung up between them. He summarized his relationship with Strong, “She courteously insisted on my sampling the goods with which she proposed to endow me. The romance of an intrigue with so famous an artist excited my imagination”8 They fell in love and soon became engaged. The only delay was supposedly the disposal of her husband, then in Texas. The marriage never materialized.9 Crowley had the good fortune of knowing Strong at the height of her career; after a few more years of singing, she retired from the stage to open a high-class London laundry on Baker Street called Nettoyage de Linge de Luxe.10 Despite the rave reviews she received at the time, the New Grove Dictionary of Opera accords Strong a less illustrious place in history: “Her few recordings, mostly of songs, show an imaginative artist with a voice probably not meant by nature for the heavy roles she undertook.”11
Another pair of Mathers’s Parisian friends, recounting tales of their Mexico vacation, reminded Crowley of Eckenstein’s invitation to climb mountains there. With GD business settled and the Abramelin operation postponed, his time was free and his wallet cumbersome. One can’t help but wonder whether Crowley’s legal troubles back in London also motivated him. Regardless, in June 1900 England became just another port as the SS Pennsylvania, Crowley’s new home, sailed for the United States. On Independence Day, still en route, he wrote a commemorative poem:
The ship to the breezes is bended;
The wind whistles off to the lee;
The sun is arisen, the splendid!
The sun on the marvellous sea!
And the feast of your freedom is ended,
O sons of the free!12
The poem’s critical tone shows Crowley was prepared to dislike the States. What he found when he arrived around July 6 made disdain even easier.
Like much of the northeastern United States (and Europe soon thereafter), New York was at the peak of a record-breaking heat wave that began in late June. On July 1, both New York and Philadelphia recorded the hottest day on record at 98 and 102 degrees respectively, with similar temperatures reported from Washington, D.C., to St. Louis. By the time Crowley arrived, there were over four hundred heat-related deaths in Manhattan alone, eight hundred throughout the metropolitan area, and hundreds more in New Jersey and New England. Even more were hospitalized with heat prostration, taxing the health care system.13 The temperature and humidity left Crowley, like so many others, prostrated. Miles of glass and concrete accentuated the heat, and he found the constant bustle repellent. He thought to himself, “The people tend to behave like the Madrileños … ‘Festina lente’ and ‘More haste, less speed’ ought to be painted up at every street corner.”14 After only two or three days, he caught a train for Mexico City.
Crowley preferred Mexico. Although hot, it was nowhere near as humid as New York. He rented part of a house overlooking the Alameda and hired a young local woman as his maid. That summer, he bought an orange pony in Iguala and went sightseeing until a bout of malaria forced him to rest in a luxurious former palace, the Hotel Iturbide.
Mexico’s rustic simplicity and stability provided a prolific phase for Crowley. The mass of poetry written at this time runs the gamut, from haunting confessions of desperate loneliness to travelogues and mystical ecstasy. “The Growth of God” is of the chilling variety:
Even as beasts, where the sepulchral ocean
Sobs, and their fins and feet keep Runic pace,
Treading in water mysteries of motion,
Witch-dances: where the ghastly carapace
Of the blind sky hangs on the monstrous verge:
Even as serpents, wallowing in the slime;
So my thoughts raise misshapen heads, and urge
Horrible visions of decaying Time.15
Other poems from this period—all later published in Oracles (1905)—include “Assumpta Canidia,” “March in the Tropics,” “Metempsychosis” and “Night in the Valley,” and “Venus.” The latter work expresses feelings of longing, regret, and even insecurity for his Venus, Susan Strong:
MISTRESS and maiden and mother, immutable mutable soul!
Love, shalt thou turn to another? Surely I give thee the whole!
Light, shall thou flicker or darken? Thou and thy lover are met.
Bend from thy heaven and hearken! Life, shalt thou fade or forget?
I know thee not, who art naked; I lie beneath thy feet
Who hast called till my spirit ached with a pang too deathly sweet.
Thou has given thee to me dying, and made thy bed to me.
I shiver, I shrink, and, sighing, lament it cannot be.
O Goddess, maiden, and wife! Is the marriage bed in vain?
Shall my heart and soul and life shrink back to themselves again?
Be thou my one desire, my soul in day as in night!
My mind the home of the Higher! My heart the centre of Light!16
Similar echoes of Strong appear in one of Crowley’s more paradoxical creations. On the heels of a torrid afternoon in a slum, his lover left him unsatisfied; thinking of his former fiancée, he wrote his own version of Tannhäuser in sixty-seven uninterrupted hours of writing. It is a piece that by its nature juxtaposes sex and creativity, England and Mexico, actress and lover. Despite inspired moments, it is ultimately long and difficult, although Crowley considered it the pinnacle of the first phase of his poetry.
In addition to writing, Crowley also began testing the GD instruction on invisibility. Based on the formula used in the Neophyte initiation, the ritual to bestow this power involved banishing the area: He began by energizing and grounding the energy centers of his body, giving the sign of the kabbalistic cross and intoning the Hebrew words for “Thine is the kingdom, the power and glory unto the ages, amen.” Next, he traced a circle in the air around himself, stopping at the east, south, west, and north quadrants to draw a protective pentagram and to call on one of the sacred Hebrew names of God. Calling upon the archangels Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel to oversee and protect him, the ritual space would be duly purified. A recitation of the first Enochian Key—reputedly written in the language of the angels and passed down from Elizabethan magician John Dee—followed. Finally, Crowley invoked the powers of concealment. The magician, visualizing a shroud about his or her body, should gradually and partially turn invisible … or so they said. The key to the illusion was neither optical nor physical, since the magician never truly disappeared. However, he did take advantage of distraction, one of the oldest principles of sleight of hand: the invisible magician affected about himself an aura which made his presence ordinary, subliminal, almost chameleonlike. When Crowley saw his reflection begin to flicker like a motion picture, he knew he was on to something. He considered himself successful when he was able to stroll through Mexico City in a golden crown and scarlet robe without attracting any attention.
On November 14 and 17 he experimented further with the Enochian evocations of Doctor John Dee. In Dee’s system, the spiritual world was stratified into thirty Aethyrs, each with its own name and conjuration. By reading the key and gazing into his crystal, Crowley unlocked the moods and visions of that sphere, writing them down as they happened. His results are surrealistic, apocalyptic, and bear the stamp of his evangelical upbringing:
An immense eagle-angel is before me. His wings seem to hide all the Heaven.
He cried aloud saying: The Voice of the Lord upon the Waters: the Terror of God upon Mankind. The voice of the Lord maketh the Skies to trem
ble: the Stars are troubled: the Aires fall. The First Voice Speaketh and saith: Cursed, cursed be the Earth, for her iniquity is great. Oh Lord! Let Thy Mercy be lost in the great Deep! Open thine eyes of Flame and Light, O God, upon the wicked! Lighten thine Eyes! The Clamour of Thy Voice, let it smite down the Mountains!17
He knew only limited success, however, for he was not yet advanced enough to pass through or comprehend any Aethyrs beyond the first two (working his way up from the thirtieth to the twenty-ninth).
Shortly afterward he met an old man named Don Jesus de Medina-Sidonia, a high-ranking chief in Scottish Rite Freemasonry (apparently unbeknownst to Crowley, this was “a miniscule irregular body”).18 Crowley’s knowledge of the mysteries so impressed Don Jesus that the Mason conferred upon him the 33°, the highest grade in the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. In commensurate spirit, Crowley used his authority from Mathers to initiate in partibus and founded a new magical order—the Lamp of Invisible Light (LIL)—in Guanajuato with Medina as its first Imperator.19 Prior to his Enochian visions—in October 1900—the mysteries of LIL had revealed themselves to Crowley, and indeed the name of this order seems influenced by those Enochian visions, as LIL is the name ascribed by Dee to the first, or highest, Aethyr.20 The order set up a perpetual flame that was invoked daily with appropriate elemental, planetary, and zodiacal forces to make it a center of light and enlightenment. The letters LPD represented its philosophical, scientific, and moral principles: liberty, power, duty; light, proportion, density; law, principle, droit. Naturally, these letters also had other secret meanings. Unfortunately, Crowley’s interest in ceremonial magick waned shortly thereafter, and he dropped out of touch with Medina; the fate of LIL is unknown.21
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