Life looked pretty grim. Crowley was a man who had climbed among the highest mountains in the world, only to have his first leadership snatched from him and his men buried in ice. As a poet, he had published so many books that his collected Works were available, even though the originals never sold. He had traveled around the world, and was now halfway around it again and finding it stale. And he was a master of magic who chose to forget his experience in Cairo. Now on the verge of his thirtieth birthday, life stared him in the face.
What next?
Empty and lost, he cabled Rose to join him in India and wrote soul-searching letters to his brother-in-law. Everything had soured, seemed stale. Even his poetry, which he had all but forgotten lately, was doubtful:
I have thought of trying serious writing again, but I am 30 and a proud Papa. Shelley and Keats never touched 30—that day is over for me. I think some small bits of work are classical with theirs, I must leave it at that. Anyway, I hope I shan’t simply go bad. At least I am certain to avoid the blunder of making a good thing and copying it forever.67
The only thing remaining was the truth that he had realized back at Cambridge, when he grasped for something in the world that could stir him: magic. He realized he had to change the world. Thus, The Sword of Song became his manifesto, and he wrote eagerly to Kelly:
This book has been boycotted by English publishers and printers. I am in arms against a world, but after five years of folly and weakness, miscalled politeness, tact, discretion, care for the feeling of others, I am weary of it. Did Christ mince his words with the Pharisees? I say today to hell with Christianity, rationalism, Buddhism, all the lumber of the centuries. I bring you a positive and primaeval fact, magic by name; and with this I will build me a new Heaven and a new Earth. I want none of your faint approval or faint dispraise; I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything, bad or good, but strong. I want men behind me, or before me if they can surpass me, but men, men not gentlemen. Bring me your personal vigour; all of it, not your spare vigour. Bring me all the money you have or can force from others. If I can get but seven such men, the world is at my feet. If ten, Heaven will fall at the sound of one trumpet to arms.68
By these words he would lead the rest of his life.
Crowley kept himself busy waiting for Rose and Lilith to arrive on October 29. He studied Persian, stayed with a maharaja in Moharbhanj, sacrificed a goat to Kali, visited his friend Edward Thornton, and went big-game hunting. Traveling to Calcutta, he also went to the infamous Culinga Bazar on October 28 during a boisterous holiday festival. At 10 o’clock in the evening, Crowley paused on the dark streets of the Bazar to revel in the fireworks and celebration until, despite himself, he stopped enjoying it. Amidst the noise and excitement, he felt uncomfortable.
He was being followed.
In an effort to shake his pursuer, Crowley ducked into an alley. Trouble followed him in the form of six figures. AC pressed into the shadows and held his breath, hoping his mountain tan and his dark clothes would conceal him until the throng passed. Just in case, he placed a tense hand on the Webley revolver in his coat. The first three walked right by him and, for a moment, he thought they hadn’t noticed him.
Then they closed in. Strong hands pinned Crowley’s arms to his sides while others searched his pockets. “Unhand me!” he barked, hoping an authoritative Englishman’s voice would frighten them off. In the glimmer of a distant flare, he caught the glint of a blade and realized his life was worthless in this back alley. His hand, still on the Webley, automatically drew the gun from his pocket and tightened around its trigger. The flash captured the sight of four white-clad figures dropping back and running. Then he found himself in silent darkness.69
In the pulse-pounding moments that followed, it never occurred to him that a gunshot could pass unnoticed among noisy fireworks. Instead, he frantically imagined the worst: crowds would soon gather to investigate the commotion. The police would frown upon an Englishman—a foreigner—shooting someone in an alley. He pictured himself in prison somewhere, never to be seen again, and desperately sought a solution.
Recalling how he passed unnoticed on the streets of Mexico City, he thought to use that magic to get him out of this fix. Closing his eyes and calling on his holy guardian angel for protection, he cast a spell of invisibility upon himself and slipped down the alley, past the crowds, out of sight.
“Go to your room,” Edward Thornton, groggy with sleep, told him that night. “Go to bed. Come around in the morning and I’ll take you to the right man.” The right man was a solicitor named Garth, who officially advised Crowley to go to the police with his story. “You’d be acquitted, of course. But you’d be kept hanging about Calcutta indefinitely. An unscrupulous man might hold his tongue and clear out of British India p.d.q.”70 Crowley waited two days before deciding to take action. He didn’t even know if the gunshot had struck anyone.
Rose arrived that day with their child, and Thornton threw them a dinner party that night. Throughout the meal, Thornton caught Crowley’s eye, gesticulated, and held up two fingers. Crowley simply looked back blankly. Thornton finally took him aside and explained: the bullet had struck two of his assailants, who confessed to the crime. The Standard carried the story the next morning; a reward was offered for the apprehension of the gunman. Ironically, the same issue featured an interview with AC as leader of the Kangchenjunga expedition. “Get out,” Thornton advised, “and get out quick.”
Heeding Thornton’s advice, Crowley looked at Rose and asked her, “Which will it be: Persia or China?”
“I’m tired of Omar Khayyam,” she remarked. “Let’s go to China.”
Rangoon began their journey. Crowley checked Rose and Lilith into a hotel while he visited Ananda Metteya, formerly known as Allan Bennett. They discussed the need for a common language if magic were ever to be studied scientifically, concluding that the system most accessible to Westerners was the kabbalah. It convinced Crowley of the importance of tabulating all systems of mysticism and religion according to the ten spheres and twenty-two paths of the Hebrew Tree of Life. Three days later, on November 6, Bennett had to return to the monastery per its rules. Following Allan’s advice on writer’s block, Crowley wrote “The Eyes of the Pharaoh” and what would form chapters I through XX of The High History of Good Sir Palamedes the Saracen Knight, a versified account of the path of initiation. The effort to write even this much, however, was stupendous.
On November 15, the Crowleys boarded the steamship Java for Mandalay. An artistic and intellectual vacuum within, Crowley spent the voyage leaning over the railing, watching the crests the boat cut into the water, watching the flying fish dancing along the surface, and trying to wrench some poetry out of himself. Finally, in his journal, he recorded, “the misery of this is simply sickening;—I can write no more.”71
By November 29 they reached Bhamo, forty miles from the Chinese border. It marked a new phase in his life. Over the next months, his mundane existence became a series of bizarre adventures while his spiritual life became a simple and stellar affair, yielding to no interference from the mundane world no matter how crippling.
From Bhamo, the three Crowleys, their porters, and Lilith’s nurse began a leisurely journey toward Tengyueh (now called Tengchung), China. All the while AC brooded about the anomie and purposelessness he felt ever since Kangchenjunga. Then, on their fourth day from Bhamo, something happened to snap AC out of his existential crisis.
Having crossed the river that marked the Chinese frontier, they climbed out of a ravine with Crowley bringing up the rear to discourage the porters from straggling. At one point, Crowley dismounted his Burmese pony to walk and stretch his legs. Once adequately limbered, he tried to mount the pony. The beast, however, reared and sent them both down a forty foot cliff. Laying on the ground, looking up at the length of their fall, Crowley waited for the pain of his broken body to kick in. When it never did, he realized he was unharmed and marveled that both he and the horse escaped without
a scratch. In that moment, he recalled all his narrow brushes with death: from the bomb he made at age fourteen to the muggers in Calcutta, he concluded his charmed life was being preserved for a greater purpose. It resolved his existential crisis.
At that moment, Aleister Crowley achieved the rank of Exempt Adept (7°=4°), the highest grade of the Second Order. With this illumination came a resolve to resume magical work. Daunted by his perceived role as the world’s greatest magus, Crowley confided in Clifford Bax:
It is very easy to get all the keys, invisible and otherwise, into the Kingdom, but the keys are devilish stiff, some of them dampered. I am myself at the end of a little excursion of nearly seven years in Hell, and the illusion of reason, which I thought I had stamped out in ’98, was bossing me. It has now got the boot. But let this tell you that it is one thing to devote your life to magic at 20 years old, and another to find at 30 that you are bound to stay a Magus. The first is the folly of a child; the second, the Gate of the Sanctuary.72
On February 11, Crowley pledged to conduct a magical retirement even as they marched across China. He devoted the next three days to studying the Goetia for inspiration, then decided once and for all to contact his holy guardian angel. To this end, he decided to recite the Goetia’s Preliminary Invocation every day. Of paramount importance was to perform the invocation daily, unfailingly. Rain or shine, tired or rested, good or bad, he had to do it.
He began on February 16, typically doing the invocation, which he called Augoeides, after Bulwer Lytton’s term for the holy guardian angel, on the astral plane, performing the rite in his imagination as he rode across the countryside on his pony. He maintained his resolve, performing the ritual every day until June 7, when he could continue no longer.
China’s Boxer rebellion was well underway when, at the beginning of January 1906, the Crowleys stayed at Tengyueh. On January 23 they reached Yungchang (what is now Paoshan), where the mandarin Tao Tai treated them to a twelve-hour banquet. Chinese New Year followed two days later.
After crossing the Mekong river on January 26, Crowley noticed that all his porters smoked opium in their free time. Although his previous exposure to the drug through Bennett had been fruitless, Crowley bought an opium pipe to learn about the fashionable drug that wealthy and intellectual Europeans flocked to the far and middle east to sample. After five hours and twenty-five pipes, AC experienced neither euphoria nor tranquility. Regardless, his muse returned, and he wrote “The King Ghost” and “The Opium Smoker.”
From there, the next two months’ journey took them to Yunnan, Mengtsz, Manhao, Hokow, Laokay (now part of northern Vietnam), Yen Bay, and the capital, Hanoi, “but only stayed for lunch.”73
Toward the end of March, AC decided they would return home by two separate routes. Crowley wished to stop in America and seek out backers for another Kangchenjunga expedition while Rose retrieved their hastily abandoned luggage from Calcutta, returning to England via the continent. Rose was very annoyed about being cast off in China with their young daughter to return home alone. Crowley reasoned that, being wanted in Calcutta, he couldn’t return there with her. She finally agreed, with the intent of staying with her father when she arrived in Scotland. She needed his help because she was three months pregnant.
Meanwhile, her husband, unknown to her, was on his way to Shanghai to look up Elaine Simpson, the former Soror Fidelis. He arrived on April 6. There, he read tarot cards for Elaine and her friends. In private moments, Crowley and Elaine discussed The Book of the Law. She read it and, much to Crowley’s chagrin, believed it to be a prophetic book; he was hoping she would denounce it and thus relieve him of the role of prophet, a burden that the book called for him to assume.
Crowley asked her to help him invoke Aiwass and speak to him. She agreed, and two days later they conducted the ceremony. In what would become Crowley’s preferred method, he summoned Aiwass while Elaine looked for him on the astral plane. Aiwass appeared to her as brilliant blue with a wand in hand. “He has followed you all along,” Elaine explained her impressions of him. “He wants you to follow his cult.” Crowley instructed her to take his wand. When she did, Aiwass turned into brilliant light and dissipated. “He seems to be tangled in a mesh of light, trying to escape.”
“Tell him that if he goes away, he cannot return,” Crowley instructed.
“He has a message: ‘Return to Egypt, with same surroundings. There I will give thee signs. Go with the Scarlet Woman, this is essential; thus you shall get real power, that of God, the only one worth having. Illumination shall come by means of power, pari passu … Live in Egypt as you did before. Do not do a Great Retirement. Go at once to Egypt: money troubles will be settled more easily than you think now. I will give you no guarantee of my truth.’ Then he turns black-blue, and says, ‘I am loath to part from you. Do not take Fidelis. I do not like the relations between you; break them off! If not, you must follow other Gods … Yet I would wish you to love physically, to make perfect the circle of your union. Fidelis will not do so, therefore she is useless.’ ”74
Satisfied with the ritual and the messages they received, they purified the area and finished. Despite Aiwass’s suggestion that Elaine make love to Crowley, she lived up to her magical motto and remained faithful to her husband. On April 21, Crowley left Soror Fidelis and sailed for America on the Empress of India. While they would remain in touch—in 1929, Crowley would note “My old and dear friend Fidelis wants me to go to Frankfurt”75—their bond would never be as strong as during their alliance in the GD years.
On April 24, while his ship docked at the Japanese port of Kobe, Crowley dutifully performed his invocation on the astral plane. This time, a vision appeared to him. In it, he entered a room in which a naked man was nailed to a cruciform table. About this table sat a group of venerable sages, busily eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the naked man. A voice told Crowley that these sages were the adepts he would someday join. As the vision continued, Crowley entered a filigreed ivory hall, a square altar in the center its only contents. “What wouldst thou sacrifice upon the altar?” the voice asked.
Crowley replied, “I offer all save my will to know Augoeides.” Knowledge and conversation of one’s holy guardian angel, after all, was the goal of all magic. At least as far as he knew. Looking about, Crowley realized he stood before the Egyptian gods, their forms so immense he could only see up to their knees.
“Would not knowledge of the gods suffice?”
Crowley was adamant. “No.”
“Thou art critical and rationalistic.”
The magician apologized for his blindness, kneeling at the altar and placing both hands upon it, right over left. A luminous figure clad in white appeared before Crowley, placing his hands upon the magician’s, then spoke, “I receive thee into the Order of the Silver Star.”
With that, Crowley returned to earth in a cradle of flame. The Secret Chiefs had accepted him as one of them, a member of the Third Order—those grades that awaited beyond the highest ones in the GD; those reserved for the Secret Chiefs. He worried whether he was ready for the demands of the job. On April 30 he wrote in his journal:
It has struck me—in connection with reading Blake—that Aiwass, etc. “Force and Fire” is the very thing I lack. My “conscience” is really an obstacle and a delusion, being a survival of heredity and education. Certainly to rely on it as an abiding principle in itself is wrong. The one really important thing is the fundamental hypothesis: I am the Chosen One. All methods will do, if I only invoke often and stick to it.76
No matter what else might happen, he had to prove himself by invoking often; otherwise, he would lose everything. Such was his understanding. What he didn’t know at the time was that, if he did stick to it, he would have to lose everything anyway.
As he sailed, Crowley’s muse moved him again, and he wrote “The True Greater Ritual of the Pentagram” and worked on commentary to The Book of the Law. The thought of returning to his wife and family also inspired hi
m to compose “Rosa Coeli,” the third in his cycle of poems to Rose.
The Empress of India reached Vancouver, British Columbia, in twelve days; he had just missed the earthquake and fires that gutted San Francisco on April 18. From Vancouver, Crowley traveled east across the continent, passing through Calgary, Winnipeg, and Toronto. Across the border in the United States, Niagara Falls impressed him. On May 15 he reached New York City, fatigued by travel. After ten days of restaurants and theaters, he found no one willing to invest in a Himalayan climb and sailed for England on May 26.
Arriving at Liverpool on June 2, Crowley picked up his mail, read the telegram, and his life fell apart.
His daughter Lilith was dead.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Great White Brotherhood
Staring at the letters from his mother and Uncle Tom, Crowley was stunned. Lilith dead? Unbelievable, yet the facts were all there: she didn’t even live long enough to reach London. Lilith Crowley had died of typhoid in Rangoon. Jewell, in one of his callous moments, remarked that Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley actually died of acute nomenclature.
Despite the heartache, Crowley struggled to recite the preliminary invocation, which he had sustained for the past four months. A sad robot, he reaffirmed his oath to persevere no matter what, offering everything that remained of his life. He wandered the streets of London, emptily running through the words in his head. June 7, on the train to Plymouth where Rose awaited, was the last time he was able to complete the conjuration. When at last he saw his wife, they fell sobbing into each others’ arms. The couple stumbled around—nervous, weak, and weeping—for the next two days.
In the midst of this misery, Crowley discovered that Rose had become an alcoholic. Desperate for something on which to blame his misfortune, he convinced himself that Lilith died because Rose, too drunk to properly sterilize a baby bottle, fed her with a contaminated nipple. But how could he blame his Rose of Heaven? The fault was not hers but the alcohol’s. And the alcoholism he blamed on her family. Tellingly, he never pointed the finger at himself for leaving his pregnant wife and infant to make their own way home from the Far East while he returned in literally the opposite direction.
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