Meeting her a continent away from the Isis-Urania Temple, she looked just the way he remembered. Her place was also as he had pictured it; after all, he had been there, in astral form. His vision had been correct in every detail, right down to the cloisonne vase he had tried lifting off the shelf with an invisible hand. Nevertheless, she proved to be a disappointment. She had married the Hong Kong merchant Paul Harry Witkowski on May 8, 1900,53 and practically abandoned magic. And although he howled when he heard her tale of wearing her adept’s robes and regalia to a fancy dress ball and winning first prize, Crowley was disappointed to draw no compassion or inspiration from Fidelis.
Disillusioned, he crossed Singapore and the southern coast of India en route to the island Ceylon, the British colony known today as Sri Lanka. Arriving in Ceylon’s capital, Colombo, on August 6, he saw firsthand how much the White Knight thrived in his new environment. The climate improved his health, eradicating his wheezing and drug dependency. He was now the Bhikkhu Ananda Metteya, an aspiring Buddhist monk. Ceylon’s Solicitor General Ponnambalam Rámanáthan (1851–1930), also known as the orthodox Shaivite guru Sri Parananda, employed Bennett as a tutor for his children in exchange for instruction in yoga and Hinduism. As part of Ceylon’s Buddhist revival, Parananda allied with Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) to advocate Buddhist education in schools. He also authored On Faith or Love of God and An Eastern Exposition of the Gospel of Jesus According to St. Mathew; the following year, he would continue the argument in his An Eastern Exposition of the Gospel of Jesus according to St. John that Christ was simply teaching yoga.54 His Biblical expositions were well received, with Metaphysical Magazine writing “we know of no more deserving and practical Commentaries on the Holy Scriptures,” while The Theosophist called their study “very interesting and very profitable”; interest in his writings would eventually lead to an American teaching visit.55 Thus two mystical mentors, Bennett and Rámanáthan, gave Crowley “my first groundings in mystical theory and practice.”56
His new environs—the Cinnamon Gardens, an affluent suburb of Colombo—inspired the poem “Dance of Shiva” and many of the other pieces that would appear in Oracles (1905). He nevertheless felt ambivalent about Colombo, and by August 17 he and Bennett moved about sixty miles northeast to Kandy, one of Ceylon’s principal cities, where they took a furnished bungalow surrounded by ancient palaces and crypts, beautiful mountains and lakes, and Buddhist and Brahman temples.
Sri Parananda, Ceylon’s solicitor general Ponnabalam Rámanáthan (1851–1930). (photo credit 4.3)
Crowley busied himself with literary preparations. He wrote “Sonnet for a Picture,”57 and Kandy cropped up again in Why Jesus Wept. He also finished revising Tannhäuser, wrote its introduction, and sent it to Kegan Paul, who produced five hundred copies to sell for five shillings apiece. Reviewers received it coldly, and even Bennett found it obscure, long, and motiveless—comparing unfavorably to The Soul of Osiris. Crowley typically considered it the pinnacle of his achievements up to that point. “What the hell do you mean by a motive?” the crushed poet argued, heaping torrents of abuse upon his guru.
Bennett explained that the piece lacked the literary transmigration of a moral. He clarified with an analogy: a moral is to a fable what a motive is to an epic poem.
With a scowl and hrumph, Crowley defended, “It’s the history of a soul: my soul; every soul; no soul!”
“I ought to do yoga instead of exciting my favorite pupil to filthy and blasphemous language.”58
Crowley agreed, and proceeded to wrap up business so he could forget it. On the literary front, he moved his next book, Carmen Sœculare, into production. With respect to climbing, he wrote to Eckenstein on August 23, placing £500 at his disposal for organizing their proposed expedition to climb a mountain higher than anyone had climbed before. On August 28, 1901, Crowley commenced instruction under Bennett, beginning with a ceremonial vow of silence for three days to facilitate introspection. His studies involved yogic postures (asana), controlled breathing (pranayama), vocal repetition (mantra), concentration (dharana), and meditation. After two weeks of this discipline, the ascetic’s life proved too much, and Crowley disappeared for a week, doubtlessly in search of women, alcohol, or some other diversion. At this time, AC sent Kelly a telling bit of advice on how to become a great painter:
A slut for your mistress, a gamin for your model, a procuress for your landlady and a whore for your spiritual guide! That is the only way to become a great artist!59
Crowley contended that asceticism’s major drawback was its failure to purge distracting impulses. Rather than submerging these buoys in the subconscious, after which they inevitably surfaced with greater force than before, he favored indulging and satiating his impulses, leaving his mind free from distraction. Thus, he returned from his hiatus prepared to immerse himself in study. Crowley diligently pursued yogic discipline, his reward coming on October 3: after eight hours of breathing at a reduced rate of once a minute, he experienced the “Golden Dawn”:
I became conscious of a shoreless space of darkness and a glow of crimson athwart it. Deepening and brightening, scarred by dull bars of slate-blue cloud arose the Dawn of Dawns. In splendour not of earth and its mean sun, blood-red, rayless, adamant, it rose, it rose! Carried out of myself, I asked not “Who is the Witness?” absorbed utterly in contemplation of so stupendous and so marvellous a fact.… And this, then, is Dhyana!60
In Book Four (1911), his classic text on yoga and magic, Crowley explained the trance of dhyana in clearer language:
In the course of our concentration we noticed that the contents of the mind at any moment consisted of two things, and no more: the Object, variable, and the Subject, invariable, or apparently so. By success in Dharana the object has been made as invariable as the subject.
Now the result of this is that the two become one.… All the poetic faculties and all the emotional faculties are thrown into a sort of ecstasy by an occurrence which overthrows the mind, and makes the rest of life seem absolutely worthless in comparison.61
Crowley received an update from Eckenstein in a letter of September 20 and a cable of October 3. Crowley transferred another £500 to Eckenstein’s budget, bringing to £1,000—equivalent to roughly $42,000 by today’s standards—his commitment to the slowly developing venture. On October 12, at Kandy, he signed a formal agreement for the climb. They set their sights on Mt. Godwin Austen, the second highest mountain in the world. It was the highest point available to Westerners at the time, with Mount Everest remaining inaccessible and therefore unclimbed by Europeans until 1921.
Spiritual success drained Crowley, so the pupil and his teacher suspended work for pilgrimages to Buddhism’s sacred cities. Their voyage began in Kandy, where they participated in Perahera, the annual celebration and circus in honor of the alleged tooth of Buddha—which Crowley was sure came from a dog or crocodile. “This celebration is no more Buddhist than the carnival at Nice is Christianity,” he mused, and shrugged his shoulders. “Io Pan!” However, the jovial display disillusioned Bennett, who believed sorrow to be the primary human condition. They moved on to the Buddhist temple at Dambulla, Sri Lanka’s largest and best-preserved complex of cave temples with statues and paintings of Lord Buddha; Crowley called it “one of the most extraordinary works of human skill, energy and enthusiasm in the world.”62 Sticking up above the jungle, the unclimbable Rock of Sigiri distracted Crowley, who determined to climb it until he realized that approaching it required cutting through miles of dense foliage. Thwarted, he instead wrote the poem “Anima Lunae”63 about King Zohra’s encounter with the spirit of the moon.
Stopping by a shallow lake, Crowley and Bennett spotted two cows and a bull. Much to the ascetic’s dismay, Crowley reached for his Mauser .303 rifle, and began a stealthy approach to this big game. When he got within one hundred yards, the bull suddenly stampeded toward him. Crowley acted quickly and, without thinking, raised his rifle, hastily aimed, and fired. But nothing happe
ned. The cartridge didn’t explode. “Balls!” he muttered under his breath as the bull charged up. It ran right past Crowley and off into the distance. Luckily it fled rather than gore the intruder. Crowley was dumbfounded. “No question about it,” he snorted. “I need a double-barreled rifle.”
The pair journeyed north by coach through desolate, monotonous plains of vegetation to Anuradhapura, one of Ceylon’s ancient capitals. This city was important to the history of Buddhism, being the place where the Ceylonese ruler converted around 250 BC; it was also the place Crowley wrote “The House,”64 based on a recurring anxiety dream that Bennett was having about a house on a moor on a dark and stormy night.
By mid-November the magicians parted ways. Bennett pursued the ascetic life of a Buddhist monk, not in Ceylon “where the sodden corruption of the Sangha sickened his sincerity,”65 but in Akyab (today called Sitwe), the port and chief city on the western coast of Burma, where he took the yellow robe at the Lamma Sayadaw Kyoung monastery. Crowley, more interested in Hinduism, pressed on to Madura in southern mainland India, en route to the Himalayas. Here he determined to see the enormous rock temples that were forbidden to Europeans. Taking a leaf from his idol Sir Richard Burton, Crowley went incognito by donning a loincloth and begging bowl. He fooled no one, but the authorities, moved by the Englishman’s sincerity, permitted him entrance to some shrines, where he sacrificed a goat to the goddess Bhavani.
On November 16 and 17, Browning’s poems “Christmas Eve” and “Easter Day” inspired Crowley to write “Ascension Day” and “Pentecost.” Crowley used Browning’s work as a stylistic model to express the philosophical issues he’d been wrestling with in magic, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Despite the weighty and serious issues explored, Crowley did so in a highly mercurial way, lacing his work with wordplay and puns. His whimsy also expressed itself by finding good rhymes for seemingly impossible words such as courtesan, Euripides, and Abramelin. These and other pieces written at this time would become The Sword of Song (1904).
Crowley continued to the temple of the Shivalingam and the “sleepy, sticky and provincial” city of Madras (now Chennai)66 before a bout of malaria laid him up in Calcutta in January 1902. He befriended and stayed with two fellow Westerners: Harry Lambe, an Anglo-Indian whose friendship with Crowley was based on twelve hours’ previous association, and Edward Thornton, an artist who always carried a sketch pad and kukuri knife at his side. In his convalescence, Crowley unsuccessfully tried to learn Hindustani and Balti in order to act as interpreter on the Himalayan expedition. On January 8 he attended as a guest the monthly meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, at which he heard the papers “On Trilokanatha in the Kanda Valley,” “On the Secret Words of the Çuluas,” and “On the Organization of Caste by Ballala Sen.”67 Around January 14, Crowley tired of the study of Vedanta and Hinduism, yearning again for Buddhism and Allan Bennett. Two months after they parted, it appeared that a reunion was in order.
On January 21, 1902, a healthy Crowley set off to rejoin his Buddhist friend, with Thornton as his companion. The most direct route to Akyab required him to sail from Calcutta to Rangoon and cross the Arakan range. Crowley’s malaria flared up again in Rangoon, leaving him to live on quinine and iced champagne. Crowley adopted a passive attitude toward his condition, no longer caring whether he recovered or died. He merely subsisted, and thereby acquired a new sympathy for Allan. Pressing ahead on January 25, they journeyed 150 miles north to Prome, Burma, where they hired a thirty-five-foot boat and sailed toward Akyab. Crowley, still sick with malaria, sat at the stern, rifle in hand, shooting at everything in sight.
He finally reached the Lamma Sayadaw Kyoung monastery in Akyab at 8 o’clock on the evening of February 14. Fortunately, the first man he encountered took him by carriage to the monastery, where he found Bennett in his bungalow, entranced, rigid, and sitting on his head like an overturned statue; his breathing exercises apparently caused his body to involuntarily leap into the air while in lotus position, landing the oblivious yogi on his head. Otherwise, he was the same old gentle Allan, a giant among his diminutive Burmese fratres. Refreshed, Crowley wrote the poem “Sabbé Pi Dukkham”68 (Pali, “All is sorrow”) that night. Allan found Aleister’s enthusiasm for the Buddhist faith refreshing, spending days discussing how best to spread Buddhism into Europe. Following his 1902 ordination as a Bhikkhu into the Theravada tradition—he was only the second Englishman so recognized—he would found the Buddhasasana Samagama, or International Buddhist Society, and begin publishing Buddhism: An Illustrated Quarterly Review, with six issues appearing between 1903 and 1908. Allan would then return to England, carrying on his work there as a Buddhist missionary and serving as one of the key figures responsible for Buddhism’s spread into the West.
Like the other exotic locations of his journey, Akyab inspired the poet in Crowley. Under its spell, he wrote “Ahab” and began working on “The Argonauts” and Book III of Orpheus. All these pieces show the residue of his studies in Hinduism and Shaivite mysticism. Crowley, reciting portions of his works to see how they would read, was surprised by the potency of Orpheus.
O triple form of darkness! Sombre splendour!
Thou moon unseen of men! Thou huntress dread!
Thou crowne’d demon of the crownless dead!
O breasts of blood, too bitter and too tender!
…
I hear the whining of thy wolves!I hear
The howling of the hounds about thy form
Who comest in the terror of thy storm,
And night falls faster ere thine eyes appear
Glittering through the mist.
O face of woman unkissed
Save by the dead whose love is taken ere they wist!
Thee, thee I call! O dire one! O divine!69
As he recited this invocation of Hecate, he had a vision of her in the form of Bhavani, the goddess to whom he had sacrificed a goat in Madura. For the poet, Akyab’s magic was strong indeed.
On February 23, Crowley bid farewell to the Bhikkhu and boarded the SS Kapurthala. He had travelled a long distance not only physically but spiritually as well. “I suppose by this time I may consider myself a pretty confirmed Buddhist,” he thought, “with merely a metaphysical hankering after the consoling delusions of Vedanta.”70 Returning to Calcutta, he collected his mail and received the awaited news: Eckenstein’s Himalayan expedition was meeting in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in late March. Crowley passed the time until then writing: he composed “St. Patrick’s Day”71 on the 17th, and completed Book III of Orpheus the following day. Over March 20 and 21 he wrote “Crowleymas Day,” later published as Berashith (1903), taken from the first word of Genesis. Subtitled “An Essay in Ontology,” it seeks to unite Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism by subjecting their ontological beliefs to mathematical analysis.
On March 23, he boarded a train for Rawalpindi. Coincidentally, Eckenstein and his four men were heading to Rawalpindi on the same train, so Crowley joined them in their carriage for introductions.
Guy Knowles (1879–1959) was a young climber who first visited the Alps in 1893, at age fourteen, where he scaled the Piz Roseg (12,917 feet) and other nearby mountains. His résumé included the Wetterhorn (12,113 feet) and Jungfrau (13,642 feet) in 1895, and the Matterhorn (14,692 feet), Gabelhorn (13,330 feet), and Wellenkuppe (12,805 feet) in 1896. In 1898, Eckenstein accompanied him on ascents of the Weisshorn (14,780 feet), Lyskamm (14,852 feet), Dent Blanche (14,291 feet), and Matterhorn by the Zmutt arête.72 Although Crowley considered him, at age twenty-two, “far too young for work of this kind,”73 Eckenstein’s firsthand experience with the climber convinced him otherwise; the fact that he was able to help finance the expedition made up for any lack of mountaineering experience.74 Guy John Fenton Knowles was the second son of Charles Julius Knowles and his wife Loyse (née Essinger) of Kensington, who were friends with many English and French artists of the era and patrons of painter and etcher Alphonse Legros (1837–1911). They started Guy in art c
ollecting while he was still a schoolboy at Rugby, introduced him to Rodin in Paris (Rodin gifted him with the first bronze cast made of his sculpture Sœur et frère), and even arranged for Legros to give Guy lessons in drawing and sculpting. He matriculated to Trinity College in June 1898, just missing Crowley; dividing his time between engineering, rowing, and the Fitzwilliam museum (where he said he passed many of the most profitable and enjoyable quieter hours of his undergraduate life), he took a Second Class in Part I of the Mechanical Sciences Tripos, receiving his BA in 1901, the year before the K2 expedition.75 Crowley found him cheerful and willing to follow directions, “the best companion I could have wished.”76
Dr. Heinrich Pfannl (1870–1929) was at age thirty-one the best rock climber in Austria, having climbed extensively on the Swiss, Ennstal, and Julian Alps. Indeed, he would in later years become the president of the Austrian Alpine Club. Born in Trumau, Lower Austria, he studied law in Vienna, received his Doctor of Laws in 1894, and in 1896 passed the exam to become an Austrian judge. In 1894, at age twenty-four, he began hiking and climbing as a spiritual retreat from the covetous, acquisitive world of law and lawyers; for him, climbing was a way to fulfill his will, of playing on death’s own border, where the only laws were those of nature.77 Thus in March 1896, when his brother Josef, also a climber, was one of three killed in an avalanche on Lower Austria’s Rax mountain over the Reistalersteig, it did not dissuade Heinrich from climbing: the same year, he made the first ascent of the Hochtor (7,772 feet) from the north, considered at that time impossible. He developed a reputation for his systematic approach and guideless climbs, giving him much in common with Eckenstein’s methodical and antiestablishment ways. Pfannl made a guideless ascent of Mont Blanc (15,404 feet), the highest Alpine mountain, in 1899. In 1900, he recorded an ascent of Aiguille de Triolet and the first free climb of Dent du Géant (or Dent del Gigante, the Giant’s Tooth, 13,165 feet), and in 1901 conquered the northern face of the Reichstein in Austria’s Ennstal Alps.78 “Superb climber as he was,” Crowley noted, “he was totally incapable of realising the magnitude of the task we had set out to perform.”79
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