Crowley’s health declined into a series of illnesses: after doctors removed an infected gland from his groin, his right eye required a series of operations, all unsuccessful. Neuralgia and an ulcerated throat then set in and remained with him most of the year. Life’s miseries left him stunned and numb, sleeping much of the time.
Then, like an angel come to put his life back on track, George Cecil Jones, Exempt Adept (7°=4°) of the Second Order, arrived on June 23 to discuss Crowley’s work. They did so for the next two days, after which Jones advised Crowley to go on a Great Magical Retirement, albeit close to home so he could be reached by telegraph if necessary. The visit eased some of Crowley’s sorrow, and helped him concentrate again on the Great Work. On July 11, three days after he entered a nursing home for an operation, Crowley resumed daily recitation of the Augoeides invocation.
Crowley left the nursing home on July 25 and, the day after, went to stay with Jones. They continued to discuss and compare their magical experiences, and the following day, Jones used a modified version of the GD’s Adeptus Minor (5°=6°) ritual to initiate Crowley: Bound upon the Cross of Suffering, AC once again spoke the words, “I, Perdurabo, a member of the Corpus Christi, do hereby solemnly obligate myself to lead a pure and unselfish life …” as he had done before Mathers in Paris six years ago. However, the ritual was more than mere repetition. It was a potent synthesis of their independent magical work, taking the ceremony to undreamed levels and inspiring him like never before. Thus began a remarkable phase of Crowley’s work, two ex-GD members collaborating on mysteries their parent order scarcely imagined.
On July 29 they started to think about founding a new magical order.
John Frederick Charles Fuller (1878–1966) shared much with Crowley. He was the son of an Anglican cleric—Rev. Alfred Fuller (1832–1927), formerly the Rector of Itchenor1—and, having a dreamy and introspective childhood, grew up later than most. He also attended Malvern and, like Crowley, learned to loathe it. In 1897, when Crowley began his third year at Cambridge, Fuller’s parents sent their son to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. The college nearly turned the boy down because he was too skinny, but accepted him on probation on August 30. He graduated a year later and joined the 43rd Infantry.
He spent the Boer War (1899) immersed in two hundred books on religion, philosophy, and other subjects and, while stationed in India in 1903, studied Hinduism, yoga, the Vedas, and the Upanishads. After reading Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1903) and E. N. Huston’s A Plea for Polygamy (1869), sexual freedom became one of his causes. Fuller believed that mankind needed to tear off the “mystic fig leaf … and stand naked and sublime in all the glory and consummation of perfect Nature.”2 In 1905 he begged his mother not to tell his father, the cleric, that he had just contributed the first of what would be many articles to the Agnostic Journal;3 it was his first overt statement of apostasy from the creed of his upbringing. The second was his essay on Crowley’s works, which he wrote during the hot summer of 1905. The Star in the West (1907) would prove to be the first and only entry into Crowley’s contest for the best essay on his works. Throughout, it shamelessly praised the poet: “It has taken 100,000,000 years to produce Aleister Crowley. The world has indeed laboured, and has at last brought forth a man.”4 The praise, however, was not shallow. Fuller considered Crowley to be England’s greatest living poet, and believed it all his life.
John Frederick Charles Fuller (1878–1966), Frater Non Sine Fulmina. (photo credit 7.1)
In October 1905, Fuller developed a record case of typhoid that lasted seventy days. On February 14, 1906, a medical board recommended an eight-month leave of absence. That April, he was discharged and sent home for a year’s sick leave. He wrote to Crowley about these events, and AC responded with his first letter to Fuller in nearly a year. Arriving August 8, 1906, it read:
I am sorry to hear of your enteric fever, but fate has treated me even worse; for after a most successful trip through China without a day’s illness for any of us, our baby girl died of that very disease on the way home.5
By mid-August they arranged their first face-to-face meeting at the Hotel Cecil. Under Crowley’s influence, his interest in the occult blossomed into fascination, and he plunged into its study. Likewise, Fuller’s knowledge of Hinduism impressed AC, spurring him on to study as well. Despite his daughter’s death, his pregnant wife’s alcoholism, and his own illness, Crowley devoted himself to magic.
At this point, not one but two individuals answering to the name “Lola” entered Crowley’s life. The first was a nickname for Vera Snepp, whom Crowley, frustrated by Rose’s alcoholism, took as a mistress during visits with Jones in Coulsdon, Surrey. She acted under the name Vera Neville,6 and was one of the most beautiful English women he had ever met. AC chronicled their affair in poems which would later become part of Clouds without Water (1909):
Lola! now look me straight between the eyes.
Our fate is come upon us. Tell me now
Love still shall arbitrate our destinies,
And joy inform the swart Plutonic brow.7
She would also become the dedicatee of Gargoyles (1906) and the model for the Virgin of the World in “The Wake World.”8
The other Lola appeared in September when Rose gave birth to Crowley’s second daughter, whom he named Lola Zaza, presumably after his mistress. The occasion was hardly glad. The infant was sickly and, for her first three days of life, so inactive that they often feared she was dead. At three weeks of age, bronchitis nearly killed her. Given what modern medicine knows about the deleterious effects of maternal alcohol consumption on a fetus, frailty and low birth weight are unsurprising; but in the Edwardian age the Crowleys could only marvel at their continued misfortune.
With Rose and the baby recovering in Chiselhurst, Crowley returned to Coulsdon to study with Jones and recuperate from his own ailments. Under these conditions, his health returned “suddenly and completely.” As with his health, Crowley also recovered his magical impetus. On September 21, he marked thirty-two weeks’ performance of Augoeides, with only a brief break during his crisis in June.
The following day, Jones and Crowley celebrated the autumnal equinox. For the occasion, Jones adapted the GD Neophyte (0°=0°) ritual, retaining and streamlining its potencies while eschewing unnecessary details. The result was a powerful formula of initiation for their proposed mystic society. Into the typical ceremony of testing and purifying a candidate they introduced spiral dancing and ritual scourging; and rather than binding the candidate to a cross as in the Adeptus Minor (5°=6°) ceremony, the candidate was pinned down and a cross cut on his chest. Jones asked Crowley to write the ceremony in verse form; the result was “Liber 671,” later dubbed “Liber Pyramidos.”9
After slight alterations by both magicians, they tested the revised ritual on October 9. Crowley considered the result among the greatest events of his career: he attained the knowledge and conversation of his holy guardian angel. He experienced Shivadarshana, the vision of Shiva. He entered the trance of samadhi, union with godhead. After six years of false starts, he succeeded at the Abramelin operation. In response, Crowley “thanked gods and sacrificed for Lola”10—his lover, not his child.
While his spiritual life soared with its victories, his personal life crumbled under the stress of its burdens: Lilith’s death, Rose’s alcoholism, and Lola Zaza’s frail grip on life. On November 4 he wrote in his diary, “Dog-faced demons all day. Descent into Hell.” In magical terms, he had plumbed the depths of the Ordeal of the Abyss, a magical rite of passage designed to obliterate the magician’s ego by destroying all he held dear: those physical attachments that Buddha blamed for reincarnation; one’s selfishness, or sense of self. The magical text “Liber Cheth” later described this spiritual desert:
Then shall thy brain be dumb, and thy heart beat no more, and all thy life shall go from thee; and thou shalt be cast out upon the midden, and the birds of the air shall feast upon thy flesh,
and thy bones shall whiten in the sun.
Then shall the winds gather themselves together, and bear thee up as it were a little heap of dust in a sheet that hath four corners, and they shall give it unto the guardians of the Abyss.
And because there is no life therein, the guardians of the abyss shall bid the angels of the winds pass by. And the angels shall lay thy dust in the City of the Pyramids …
And behold! if by stealth thou keep unto thyself one thought of thine, then shalt thou be cast out into the abyss for ever; and thou shalt be the lonely one, the eater of dung, the afflicted in the Day of Be-with-Us.11
Mathers had never warned him about it, and he couldn’t have, because he never advanced this far along the spiritual path. But Crowley now realized the truth: only one who released everything was light enough to cross the desiccated yaw of the Abyss, to surpass the Second Order’s highest grade of Exempt Adept (7°=4°) and follow the path of the Secret Chiefs and their Great White Brotherhood. By contrast, those who clung to some vestige of their former lives were mired forever in the Abyss, doomed as one of the Black Brothers who elevated their egos to the godhead. “I cannot even say that I crossed the Abyss deliberately,” Crowley wrote, illustrating that, although few ever advanced this far, the terrible ordeal was an eventuality for all magicians, a consequence of one’s earliest oaths. “I was hurled into it by the momentum of the forces which I had called up.”12
Thus Crowley surrendered all he valued, knowing that if he did not, the gods would wrench it from his feeble hands. When British Customs seized Philippe Renouard’s shipment of AC’s latest (Alexandra), deemed it obscene, and destroyed all copies, it seemed like a test of his resolve.
This illumination also recalled the warning written in the repugnant third chapter of The Book of the Law:
Let the Scarlet Woman beware! If pity and compassion and tenderness visit her heart; if she leave my work to toy with old sweetnesses; then shall my vengeance be known. I will slay me her child: I will alienate her heart: I will cast her out from men: as a shrinking and despised harlot shall she crawl through dusk wet streets, and die cold and an-hungered.13
And he understood. The gods had killed Lilith because his attachment to her was impeding his progress in the Great Work. The gods killed her because Rose had failed in her role as Crowley’s magical partner. The gods killed her as a warning. In that moment, Crowley realized the cosmos played by very tough rules.
On the eighth anniversary of his initiation into the GD—his spiritual birthday—Crowley dedicated the epilogue of his collected Works to Jones, who had acted as Kerux at his admission to that group:
Eight years ago this day you, Hermes, led me blindfold to awake a chosen runner of the course. “In all my wanderings in darkness your light shone before me though I knew it not.” To-day (one may almost hope, turning into the straight) you and I are alone. Terrible and joyous! We shall find companions at the End, at the banquet, lissome and cool and garlanded; companions with a Silver Star or maybe a Jewelled Eye mobile and uncertain—as if alive—on their foreheads. We shall be bidden to sit, and they will wreathe us with immortal flowers, and give us to drink of the seemly wine of Iacchus—well! but until then, unless my heart deceives me, no third shall appear to join us. Indeed, may two attain? It seems a thing impossible in nature.…14
The Silver Star and Jeweled Eye in the triangle were symbols of the Third Order, the AA, the Great White Brotherhood of Secret Chiefs. Crowley considered himself and Jones to be alone among the most advanced adepts in the world. However, lacking a third initiate to complete their founding triad (à la Westcott-Woodman-Mathers), they could not begin their new order.
On December 10, Jones served as harbinger for the Secret Chiefs, who again invited Crowley to join their ranks in the Third Order. No longer was he Frater OY MH, as he was known as an Exempt Adept (7°=4°), the seventh in the magical hierarchy and fourth from the pinnacle. He had crossed the Abyss and had advanced to the eighth level, previously considered unattainable by corporeal beings. Or, as Jones put it, “OY MH is 8°=3°.”
“And Mollie Lee rhymes with both,” he replied flippantly. Nevertheless, Jones insisted that, as 8°=3°, Crowley had not only attained the grade of Master of the Temple but had become the Master: the next Buddha, the logos, the prophet of a new age. He thereupon performed a ritual to consecrate Crowley a Master of the Temple. Although Crowley still considered himself unfit for the honor, the ritual made him feel like a genuine master.
The next day—when Crowley went to Bournemouth and placed himself under a doctor’s care for throat trouble—he received a letter from Jones, reiterating the topic of their meeting:
How long have you been in the Great Order, and why did I not know? Is the invisibility of the AA to lower grades so complete?15
Crowley found his attainment increasingly difficult to deny.
As he recuperated, he recalled his conversation with Allan Bennett about the value and necessity of the kabbalah as a universal language for magic. Crowley sat down on December 15 with the table of correspondences that Bennett had left him prior to his move to Ceylon and began to expand the entries. For the first four days, he devoted only eight hours to the project, but soon began to work on it in larger doses. On Christmas, for example, he spent all day and night working. Only a heated discussion between Crowley and Jones on the nature of truth and magical attainment, as discussed in Crowley’s new essay “Amath”16 (Hebrew for “truth”), diverted him. The completed work tabulated all the information taught by the GD, plus the knowledge Crowley had acquired in his trips to the world’s sacred sites; it would be published as 777 in 1909.
On January 29, 1907, Crowley left Bournemouth and returned home.
Lola Zaza Crowley took a downturn on Friday, February 15. Since her first frail days, she had developed respiratory complications that required a nurse to watch over her. She was on oxygen, and the doctor ordered that only one person be permitted in the room with her at a time.
Rose’s mother, Blanche Kelly, came in to visit the baby that Saturday. Crowley disliked his mother-in-law, and when she broke the rules about Lola’s care, a row erupted. In the end, Crowley threw her out of the flat and, in his mind, saved the baby’s life. Alas, combined with Rose’s drinking and his own affair, the incident only contributed to marital discord.
The evening started out like any other: Crowley walked down to Stafford Street to his favorite haunt, chemist E. Whineray, who supplied unusual ingredients for his ceremonial perfumes and incenses. Whineray’s bald head and large eyes—shining alike with laughter and cynicism—reminded Crowley of an owl. “He knew all the secrets of London. People of all ranks, from the courtier and the cabinet minister, to the coachman and the courtesan, made him their father confessor,” Crowley wrote. “He understood human frailty in every detail and not only forgave it, but loved men for their weaknesses.”17 Like Eckenstein, he could see through Crowley and understood him—a trait on which Crowley depended.
Edward Whineray (1861–1924) was born in Ulverston, Lancashire, about a year after saddler William Whineray wed Betsy Hodgson.18 He became an apprentice of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain in 1875 and helped found the Chemists’ Assistants’ Union in 1898, after which he became managing director at pharmaceutical chemists W. E. Lowe Co. Ltd. on 8 Stafford Street, building a distinguished clientele.19 Crowley claims that Whineray’s shop appears in novelist Robert Smythe Hichens’s Felix (1902), although Crowley fails to provide any details. In fact, Hichens’s unnamed fictional chemist on Wigmore Street discreetly dispenses morphine to society ladies, even in the dead of night.20 In his only review published in The Equinox, Whineray wrote of Chronicles of Pharmacy, “To the student of the occult it ought to appeal strongly, as the author gives a long list of drugs used in religious ceremonies in different ages.”21
This day, Whineray had something new for him. The Right Honourable George Montagu Bennet (1852–1931), 7th Earl of Tankerville and Lord Ossulston, sought an in
troduction.22 A thirteenth-generation descendent of princess of England Mary Tudor (1496–1533), Bennet was the second son of Charles Augustus Bennet (1810–1899) and Lady Olivia Montagu (1830–1922). He lived a colorful life, beginning as a Royal Navy midshipman in 1865, until severe sea-sickness compelled him to resign. From there, he won the Ottley prize for drawing at Radley College, was a member of the Rifle Brigade from 1872, and aide-de-camp to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. His older brother Charles’s death in 1879 of cholera in Pahawur, India, left him heir to the peerage, so he assumed the title of Lord Bennet and left the army. Next, he went ranching in the western United States, where he was friendly with Teddy Roosevelt (1858–1919). In 1892 he met and befriended American Methodist gospel singer and evangelist Ira D. Sankey (1840–1908), accompanying him on many revivals and conducting some of his own.23 At one revival, he met Leonora Sophia van Marter, a music teacher of Tacoma, Washington, whom he married on October 23, 1895.24 The earldom passed to Bennet upon his father’s death in late December 1899.25 Although one of the richest earldoms in England, with 31,500 acres of land and its chief seat Chillingham Castle in Northumberland (famous for its herd of white wild cattle), it also had the highest rent. Consequently, Bennet was constantly in financial straits, residing in the family’s much more modest Thornington House in Northumberland.26 Known as “The Singing Earl,” he studied under Giovanni Sbriglia (1832–1916), was first president of the Newcastle Symphonium Society, sang at revivals, and participated in concerts until his death. He was also painted miniatures, some of which won awards27 and were hung in the Royal Academy.28
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