Eckenstein joined Crowley in Mexico in December 1900, taunting him for wasting time on poetry and occultism when he could be climbing. Nevertheless, Crowley confided in him that after searching so long for the truth, he was troubled to find dramatic ritual dissatisfying. Fully expecting some belittling jibe, his friend’s thoughtful reply jolted him. “Do you know what your problem is? You’re unable to control your thoughts. You’re scattered, and you waste energy. You have to learn how to concentrate.” This comment struck Crowley with such clarity and truth that he wondered whether Eckenstein was a master in disguise. He recalled, back at Wastdale Head, begging the gods to send him a tutor; instead, he began to suspect, they sent two: Baker and Eckenstein.
Although the mountaineer considered himself no master, he devised a course of study for Crowley. His instructions on concentration involved visualizing objects, beginning with simple forms and advancing with practice to more complicated ones, such as moving objects or human beings. He also assigned similar tasks for the other senses. Eckenstein monitored and commented on Crowley’s progress, and when too zealously pursued, told him when to back off,22 which they did by mountain climbing.
At that time, there was scarcely any published account of previous climbs in Mexico. Furthermore, the locals had little interest in the mountains around them. The exception was geologist Ezequiel Ordóñez (1867–1950) of the State Geological Survey, after whom the rhyolite crystal Ordóñezite is named and who would later that year discover the first petroleum deposits in Mexico. He had written extensively on the mountains and volcanoes of Mexico23 and, having climbed many of them, facilitated Crowley and Eckenstein’s ascents.24
They began in January 1901 in the town of Amecameca, thirty-six miles southeast of Mexico City. It rested between the bases of two volcanoes. The first of these, Ixtacíhuatl, the White Lady of Mexico, was a triple-peaked extinct volcano rising to Ixtacíhuatl (17,343 feet) and is the only Central American mountain with a permanent glacier. Its neighbor, Popocatépetl (17,802 feet), was an active volcano with a crater half a mile wide. Requiring a couple of good men with mules, they met with the jefe politico or mayor of Amecameca, courted him with cigars and liquor, and explained their intent to climb Ixtacíhuatl. After four days’ negotiation, he agreed to help.
Eckenstein and Crowley found only sketchy and dubious records of previous ascents, and concluded Ixtacíhuatl had never been fully explored. The warning of I. R. Whitehouse, the previous person to attempt a climb, that “I doubt if it would be possible to reach the summit or summits by any other route than the one we took, as on all sides, as far as I could discover, there were sheer ice walls and precipices,”25 only enticed, rather than dissuaded, them. Unsure what to expect, they cautiously began on its lower slopes. The sun was relentless, and nowhere did they encounter the streams they expected to find running down from the glacier. Dehydration threatened, but they finally located a spring, checked their provisions, and prepared to finish the climb. Setting up camp at 15,807 feet, they spent the next three weeks scaling the White Lady’s slopes from every side.
On January 19, they ascended the icy summit of Panza, the central summit of Ixtacihuatl, from the east-northeast, overcoming a 220-foot rock wall along the way. On the 24th they crossed “some of the worst walking we had ever encountered”26 to the snowy northern summit of Cabeza (16,883 feet); its flat snowy surface concealed gaps between giant hunks of ice which had fallen from an avalanche, so that some steps fell on solid ice while others sank into deep pits of snow. On the 28th they tackled Panza from a different approach.27 The north ridge of Panza was Ixtacíhuatl’s great challenge: its shadow kept the area bitterly cold, with frostbite a serious threat; and the ridge’s seventy-foot ice wall rose at a steep incline of fifty-one degrees, and was so rotten that the surface ice needed to be chopped away before their crampons could find a satisfactory hold. Nevertheless, they managed to ascend at a rate Crowley says “beat the record for similar altitudes very easily.”28 Eckenstein reported this ascent as 2,687 feet in two hours at the lower altitudes, and 907 feet per hour (including stops) between altitudes of 13,717 and 17,343 feet.29 By the last three days of the climb, the intrepid adventurers were living on nothing but champagne and Danish butter. This was not uncommon among mountain climbers, as the body expended so much energy both climbing and staying warm that maintaining one’s weight was frequently a challenge.
Returning to Amecameca in understandably high spirits, they sought the jefe politico for a celebration, only to find a dour official. He regretfully informed them of Queen Victoria’s death on January 22. To his surprise, the pair shouted for joy and broke into dance. Later, Crowley explained, “To us, Queen Victoria was sheer suffocation.”30
They next rode nineteen hours by rail to Guadalajara, followed by another two days to Zapotlán, the town nearest where the Sierra Madre and a chain of volcanic mountains converged. Here they found more peaks to conquer, including the Nevado de Colima with its two summits of 14,239 feet (southwest) and 14,039 feet (northeast); and its neighbor to the south, the Colima volcano (14,206 feet), the most active and dangerous volcano on the continent. Three days’ rough traveling from Zapotlán took them to the horseshoe-shaped ridge at the base of the Nevado de Colima, where they struck camp. On March 3 they tackled the twin peaks: the first was an easy scramble and climb, and they were evidently the first ever to reach the top; the higher southwestern summit was even easier, and they could tell it had been climbed before.
Next, they hacked and marched their way through the forest toward Volcán di Colima for two days until, twelve miles from their destination, the volcano erupted. Its hot ash, carried by the wind, landed on them and burned through their clothes. They camped on the crest of a ridge directly north of the volcano and observed over a dozen eruptions over the course of twenty-four hours. Approach was impossible; as Eckenstein wrote, “it presented the cheerful alternatives of death by bombardment or by cremation.”31 So Crowley and Eckenstein made the most of the situation by climbing the neighboring mountain and watching the volcano for a pattern in its eruptions. After a week’s vigil, they detected no pattern whatsoever and decided to take their chances and begin climbing the peak. The futility of their attempt soon became clear when the soles of their boots burned through.
Volcán di Colima (14,206 feet) ten seconds after erupting at 4 p.m. on March 7, 1901. (photo credit 4.2)
Eckenstein and Crowley’s next goal was Citlaltépetl (Pico de Orizaba), located in Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico. At 18,491 feet, its inactive volcanic peak was the highest point in Mexico and the third highest in North America.
Setting out from Mexico City on April 3, they arrived in Chalchicomula to find further transport impossible due to local saints’ days for the next five days. Facing what, even at this distance, was obviously an easy scramble, the pair gave up. Crowley bitterly watched vultures swoop about the landscape:
Dim goes the sun down there behind the tall
And mighty crest of Orizaba’s snow:
Here, gathering at the nightfall, to and fro,
Fat vultures, foul and carrion, flap, and call
Their ghastly comrades to the dome’d wall
That crowns the grey cathedral. There they go—
The parasites of death, decay and woe,
Gorged with the day’s indecent festival.32
They next traveled from Mexico City to Toluca, and from there to Calimaya, the city nearest the inactive volcano Nevado de Toluca (also known as Xinantécatl or Cinantécatl, 15,354 feet), whose crater was the basin for lakes of melting snow. This was the site of their camp; from here, it was difficult to tell which of the two most visible peaks on the ridge of the crater was tallest: Pico del Fraile (the Friar’s Peak) or El Espinazo del Diablo (the Devil’s Backbone), so they climbed both. On April 10 they scaled Pico del Fraile; Eckenstein was sick the next morning,33 so Crowley ascended El Espinazo alone.
While the mountaineers puzzled out an ascent of Volcán di Colima, Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trübner and Company prepared Crowley’s next opus, The Soul of Osiris. It was the second half of The Mother’s Tragedy, which was so long that Kegan Paul had suggested splitting it into two separate works. It appeared on March 7 in an edition of five hundred copies, plus six on India paper. The book garnered mixed reviews. The Westminster Review wrote, “it cannot be denied that Aleister Crowley is a true poet—a poet of the school of Baudelaire and Poe.”34 Most notable was by up-and-coming writer G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), who wrote in the June 18 Daily Mail:
We have all possible respect for Mr. Crowley’s religious symbols and we do not object to his calling upon Shu at any hour of the night. Only it would be unreasonable of him to complain if his religious exercises were generally mistaken for an effort to drive away cats.…
If Mr. Crowley and the new mystics think for one moment that an Egyptian desert is more mystic than an English meadow, that a palm tree is more poetic than a Sussex beech, that a broken temple of Osiris is more supernatural than a Baptist Chapel in Brixton, then they are sectarians … But Mr. Crowley is a strong and genuine poet, and we have little doubt that he will work up from his appreciation of the Temple of Osiris to that loftier and wider work of the human imagination, the appreciation of the Brixton Chapel.35
Despite Chesterton’s ideological reservations, it was proof that even the Atlantic Ocean was not wide enough to stop the flow of Crowley works.
Crowley and Eckenstein began their final Mexican climb on April 17. However, the route up the second highest peak in Mexico, Popocatépetl (17,802 feet), was actually more like “walking up very objectionable scree, or rather volcanic debris, lying at practically the critical angle.”36 The mountain’s claim to fame was that its ascent in 1521 by Francisco Montaño was arguably the earliest record of any high ascent on a mountain. On their climb 380 years later, Eckenstein and Crowley brought along a Chicago-based newspaper writer who reported the climb as his syndicated alter ego, “Mr. Dooley,” who commented humorously on political and social issues in a thick Irish accent (written phonetically). While neither Crowley nor Eckenstein identify this writer, “Mr. Dooley” wass the immensely popular creation of Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936); his article “Mr. Dooley Climbs Popo” recounted his adventures with “me former counthrymon, the Shivvyleer O’Rourke, an’ his parthner-in-crime, Bar-ron von Eckenstein.”37 Greeting the climbers on this last adventure was an amazing display of nieves penitentes, formations of ice flakes that were two to four feet high and up to eighteen inches thick, running diagonally in parallel rows up the mountain over several acres.
Eckenstein left Mexico on April 20, bound for England to arrange an expedition that, if successful, would place them in the history books.
When Allan Bennett left London, so did Crowley. Likewise when Eckenstein left Mexico, Crowley did too. After nine months of Mexico he prepared to visit GD alumni Elaine Simpson and Allan Bennett in Asia. On April 22 he journeyed to San Francisco, where he spent a week. The Bay City for him was “rank and gross, without a touch of subtlety.”38 On May 3, he set sail for Honolulu on the Nippon Maru. Having solemnly pledged to pursue magic again, he passed the voyage honing his concentration skills. His diaries from this period show a strong influence of Theosophy: his May 8 entry mentions Adyar-Theosophy’s cofounder Bishop Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934), and elsewhere he writes of his determination to look up the local Theosophists. He landed in Hawaii on May 9, noting this was also “White Lotus Day,” in honor of TS founder H. P. Blavatsky (1831–1891). In actuality, the commemoration of Blavatsky’s death was a day earlier, May 8.
Waikiki Beach became, for a month, the center of Crowley’s outpourings, immortalized in “On Waikiki Beach.”39 He also wrote Book One of Orpheus (1905)—which he dedicated to Eckenstein. “What a hell scene I can write,” he reported eagerly to Gerald Kelly. “You wait.”40
On May 10, he met Mary Alice Rogers (née Beaton)41 of Salt Lake City at his hotel. Of Scottish descent, she was ten years older than Crowley and married to a lawyer. She had come to Honolulu with her thirteen-year-old son, Blaine, to escape hay fever. The boy was bright and intelligent, yet, to Crowley’s astonishment knew no language other than English and was equally unskilled in math, history, and geography. He thought it criminal that school provided no grist for such a bright child’s mill.42 Mary was one of the sweetest, most beautiful women Crowley had ever known. From the beginning, he calculated an affair and breakup with her to inspire his poetic muse; this premeditation is evident in his diaries where, early on, he begins referring to her as “Alice,” the pseudonym to which Crowley would ultimately address a series of love poems collectively titled Alice: An Adultery (1903). All the while he mused how absurd it was for him to come all the way to Hawaii “only to fall in love with a white woman.”43
Crowley convinced her to accompany him to Japan. With boy in tow, they sailed on the American Maru. On the thirteenth day of their acquaintance, they kissed for the first time, his diary noting that he “told her I loved her; kissed and was kissed.”44 Still, the relationship advanced at a slower pace than Crowley preferred. On May 23, his diary reads, “Kissing all evening.… All this should prepare a superb Eurydice lament when we part.” Two days later, he entered in his diary, “Promised not to do anything against her will, so we lay together about an hour on my bed kissing.” He dismantled the temple in his cabin the next day: “Took down my shrine.… The ‘affaire’ seems designed by the devil to take up maximum of time and virility.”45 All the while he promised himself,
Another month to be a man,
Another month to kiss her and be kissed,
And then—all time to Magic and to Art!46
They wrestled with guilt—“The silly ‘Thus far and no farther,’ ”—but appetite overcame chastity, and the affair commenced. Even as it did, Crowley confided in his journal, “don’t much care what happens really. Love is good, but so is freedom.”47 Mary was equally conflicted about her infidelity. Some nights she locked her cabin door and refused to see Crowley; on others, she accommodated him. Before the month was over, their relationship ended. On June 29, 1901, Crowley noted in his diary, “Finished with that foolishness. Alice sailed at noon. Thirty-eight days from when we kissed all wasted—or all rest.” Thus, he was free to chase after magic and art in Shanghai while she rejoined her home and husband in Utah. Crowley summarized, in much kinder terms than his diary’s, this liaison in a letter to Gerald Kelly:
We loved, and loved chastely.
On the boat we fell to fucking, of course, but—here’s the miracle!—we won through and fought our way back to chastity and far deeper, truer love.48
The fifty days between their meeting and parting inspired Crowley to commemorate their relationship in a series of fifty sonnets, one for each of those days. The book Alice: An Adultery (1903) testifies to the most puzzling aspect of Crowley’s relationships: when he loved, he did so with his whole being, but the passion was typically short-lived. Like the prototypical double-ended candle, his emotions burned more fiercely, and his losses seemed twice as dark. He expressed his anguish over losing this forbidden paramour in another poem from this period:
“I am so faint for utter love I sigh and long to die.”49
Despite his heartache, Crowley, as ever, found in the encounter the energy and inspiration for new works: his thirty days as a man being up, he returned dutifully to magic and poetry, neither of which he had truly abandoned so much as neglected during this time. Proofs for Tannhäuser awaited in a Hong Kong post office, and he continued writing “Book II” of Orpheus, which he dedicated to Mary Beaton, “whom I lament.” In a letter to Kelly, Crowley described his state of mind at the time: “my ideas are changing and fermenting. You will not recognize my mind when I get back. I am calm and happy and thoroughly energetic at the same time.”50
By July, a new manuscript went into production. Despite slow sales of previous works, he remained undaunted. The Mother’s Tragedy came out in an edition of fiv
e hundred copies. Press opinions were again divided on this volume: while Oxford Magazine wrote, “Mr. Crowley has a claim to recognition as a true poet … Magnificent poems—pagan in their intensity and vividness of colouring,” the Athenaeum wrote, “If the reader can form a conception of a wind-bag foaming at the mouth, he will get some notion of ‘The Mother’s Tragedy,’ and other Poems (privately printed).”51 The Westminster Review noted “The love of a man for his own mother, not according to a moral but a sexual standard, is not quite a novel idea, but Mr. Crowley handles the subject in a revolting fashion,” while The Academy noted that Crowley “frequently expressed things with all his uncompromising completeness, which poetry (to our mind) had better leave unexpressed.”52
Back in April, while scaling mountains and volcanoes in Mexico, Crowley began corresponding with Elaine Simpson. She had been his ally in the GD dispute, one of the few members loyal to Mathers, and helped him seize headquarters. Inspired by Mrs. Simpson’s accusation that Crowley had visited her daughter’s bedroom in astral form, they agreed to an experiment: every weekend they would visit each other on the astral plane. Recording their results, their diaries could later be compared for accuracy. On April 17, the evening following Crowley and Eckenstein’s return to Amecameca from Nevado de Toluca, it began. Crowley visualized himself traveling to Hong Kong, where she now lived, within an egg of white light. In a green and white room, he met Fidelis, who dressed in a soft, white wool gown with velvet lapels. “Ave, Soror,” he greeted her in Latin, and conversed for a while. Thus it started.
Even during his tryst with “Alice,” Elaine Simpson, the former Soror Fidelis, was on his mind. On May 19, 1901, his diary records a bad dream: “Broken images in my Shrine—reconciliation with [Florence Farr] Emery—some foulest sexual ideas—& Fidelis running like a golden cord throughout.” Now proceeding to Shanghai, Crowley’s thoughts were consumed with Simpson, whom he had visited on the astral plane every Saturday evening for the past months. She was one of the only people who could understand the psychological changes he was experiencing. And she could help him forget “Alice.”
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