Two days later, he sailed back to London and checked Rose’s progress. Her drinking, he discovered, was worse than ever, so he returned to Paris, taking their daughter, Lola, with him. At best, the act might induce Rose to comply with her treatment; at the very least, it would keep the child out of harm’s way.
On October 1, Crowley began a magical retirement dubbed “John St. John,”21 whereby he hoped to demonstrate how any person could conduct a magical retirement for a fortnight while still living a mundane work a day life. Each day, he practiced hatha yoga and his rewritten, solitary version of “Liber Pyramidos” in order to demonstrate how any person could attain to the knowledge and conversation of their holy guardian angel.
The same evening he began his retirement, Nina Olivier introduced Crowley to Parisian model Mary Waska, whom he described as a redheaded bundle of mischief. He bought her dinner, then brought her to his room to make love. Naked, she reminded Crowley of Corregio’s (1489?–1534) portrayal of Antiope.22 Under this inspiration, he penned “The Two Secrets,” which would later appear in The Winged Beetle (1910).
In November, Crowley purchased Maugham’s newest novel, The Magician. It was the story of blubbery, debased magician Oliver Haddo and his victimization of an innocent couple. As he read, something about the book struck him as vaguely familiar. Then it dawned on him that many of Haddo’s words were his own, uttered in conversations with Maugham at Le Chat Blanc. In fact, Haddo’s entire character was modeled on him. Crowley was flattered.
Nevertheless, something else about the book seemed familiar. On closer inspection, it appeared that Maugham had inserted long unacknowledged quotes from magical texts that Crowley had recommended to him. As he read, Crowley recognized passages lifted wholesale from Mathers’s The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887), Franz Hartmann’s The Life and Doctrines of Paracelsus (1891), and A. E. Waite’s translation of Éliphas Lévi’s Rituel et Dogme de la Haute Magie (1896). He also noted portions that paralleled books by Mabel Collins and H. G. Wells.
Crowley wrote up an exposé and submitted it to Vanity Fair. Editor Frank Harris was incredulous until Crowley brought a stack of books into his office and proved his point. However, the piece was too long to use in its full form, so an edited version appeared in the December 30, 1908, issue as “How to Write a Novel! After W.S. Maugham.”23 As a final ironic twist, Crowley published it under the pseudonym Oliver Haddo.
When Crowley and Maugham met a few weeks after the article appeared, Maugham was good-humored about it all. He laughingly admitted that his book contained even more unacknowledged quotes than the article mentioned. Crowley replied, “Harris cut my article by two-thirds for lack of space. You know, I almost wish that you were an important writer.” Crowley’s statement is tinged with jealousy, since Maugham, after ten years of failure as a playwright, now had four plays running in London’s West End and was the talk of the town. Crowley’s own works, meanwhile, remained unsuccessful: book sales were slow, and he had released nothing since Konx Om Pax at the beginning of the year.
That changed around New Year’s Day, when his next book, a collection of devotional poems to the Virgin Mary, appeared. The title came from the “password” Crowley had chosen randomly at the autumnal equinox of 1907 when the book was written: Amphora. The book was anonymous, “Privately printed for the Authoress and her intimates” by the Arden Press. Its epilogue contained one of Crowley’s classic acrostics:
Transcend, O Mage, thy soul redeemed!
Her mercy shone where sorrow steamed.
Exalted in the skies of even
Virtue hath cleared thy way to Heaven.
In darkness hides the glittering ore.
Revealed thy Light, O mystic lore
Given by God, lest I should err
In dexter or in sinister.
Now Mary Virgin to my speech
Married Her fire that all and each
At last should gather to the Tryst
Ripe suns arisen above the mist!
Yea! Thou hast given me favour! Yea!
In utmost love and awe we pray;
Devoted to Thy reverence
Enkindle I the sweet incense.
Secure from all the fears that chill
In peace from them that rage and kill;
Receive, O Queen, the glad Oration
Even from a lost and pagan nation.
But Thou will make us wholly fit
Unto Thy grace and care of it.
Till all the Elixir do receive
(Amen) to heal the hurt of Eve.
Reading the first letter of the first word of each line then the first letter of the last word of each line reveals a phrase certain to thrill schoolboys and shock pontiffs: “The Virgin Mary I desire, but arseholes set my prick on fire.” A simpler acrostic appears in the initial letters of the prologue:
Those Pagans gazing on the Heavenly Host
Were blest of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost;
And me, though I be as an heathen mage,
Thou wilt accept in this my pious page.
Both hidden messages went unnoticed by readers, and it is just as well, as Crowley’s intent was not to blaspheme. The book originated with the realization that several of his poems in praise of non-Christian goddesses (and, often, gods) became perfectly acceptable hymns by merely changing the name to Mary and perhaps changing a key word or two. He thought this significant, and set about to write a set of hymns to the Virgin Mary from the mind set of a pious Christian. As Crowley explained, “I do not see why I should be confined to one life. How can one hope to understand the world if one persists in regarding it from the conning tower of one’s own personality?”24 The acrostics were merely a sign not to take the work too seriously.
When Catholic circles responded enthusiastically to the book, Crowley removed the epilogue and submitted it to the firm of Burns & Oates for republication. Crowley did nothing to dispel rumors that its author was a leading London actress. Some time later, Wilfrid Meynell (1852–1948), who ran the company, discovered who the “authoress” really was. In response, his wife passed out, and he pulled the book, returning the unsold sheets to Crowley.
The New Age, reviewing Crowley’s reissue of the book two years later under the title Hail Mary, found the poems “all marked by that facility and freedom of diction and metrical fluency that are such striking features of the author’s profaner works,” but concluded, “Personally, I find Mr. Crowley the devotee of Mary considerably less interesting and much less amusing than Mr. Crowley the singer of strange and obscene gods, Abracadabras, and things one doesn’t mention.”25
The doctors gave up on Rose at the beginning of 1909. She was uncooperative with her regimen, refusing to stop drinking, and her only hope was institutionalization for two years. Only then could doctors control and monitor her behavior. Rose refused.
Hearing this news, Crowley too gave up. He claimed he still loved her, but could no longer bear to watch her kill herself. He demanded a divorce. So that the proceedings would not reflect poorly on her, Crowley agreed for Rose to divorce him for infidelity. Although Crowley says he manufactured the necessary evidence, he didn’t have to look too far, given his recent trysts. Despite this wrinkle, Rose and Aleister still lived together and saw each other daily.
His friendship with Gerald Kelly, however, became strained, and they eventually parted. Gerald’s bitterness would never fade; when Crowley called on him in the 1930s, an immediate altercation broke out, leaving Gerald too furious to speak for five minutes afterward. Although Crowley resentfully characterized him as a “quack painter,” Kelly would be commissioned to do the state portraits of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1938, knighted in 1945, and elected president of the Royal Academy in 1949, among other honors. He is remembered as “the most reliable portrait painter of his time.”26
The order known as AA came into its own in the first months of 1909. Although commonly referred to as the Argenteum Astrum (Latin for “Silver Star”) or some variation th
ereon, the true name of the order was never publicly disclosed. As a preliminary stroke, Crowley anonymously released the tables of correspondences under the title 777 (1909), a number which refers to the flashing sword of creation superimposed on the Tree of Life. Walter Scott published the slim fifty-four–page volume. While the Occult Review praised its comprehensiveness in publishing what “has been jealously and foolishly kept secret in the past,”27 Allan Bennett’s Buddhist Review curiously found it obscure and undignified. In his personal copy of the book, GD member F. Leigh Gardner called it “Borrowed Plumes” from the Golden Dawn.28 Indeed, the book expanded on the original tables of correspondence compiled by MacGregor Mathers, Allan Bennett, and George Cecil Jones.
Crowley had no time to worry about reactions to his newest book. Now that the AA was taking on students, it was time to go public with the order’s official organ. He had already laid the groundwork by December, 1908, and on the spring equinox of 1909—March 20—Crowley unveiled to the unsuspecting public his biannual journal, The Equinox.
But, he thought, how would it look for a great teacher to make vast sums of money on his occult knowledge? He would look like a con man, peddling “Secret Knowledge” to the man on the street while he himself lived like a king. No, it had to look like the rewards of initiation were so great that material reward was meaningless. He decided to make no money on this venture; his books on magic had to sell at or below cost. Thus no one could accuse him of profiting from his learning.
The Equinox was his most ambitious project to date. A ponderous, hardover journal, its first number was 255 pages long plus a 139-page supplement. It featured pieces by Crowley, Neuburg, and Fuller, plus contributions from Vanity Fair editor Frank Harris, Lord Dunsany, and chemist Edward Whineray. The title page said it all:
THE EQUINOX
The Official Organ of the AA
The Review of Scientific Illuminism
“The Method of Science—The Aim of Religion”
The editorial announced the existence of the AA, calling on students to contact the chancellor at their business address. The chancellor was Frater NSF (None Sine Fulmine, “Not without fire”), which was Fuller’s motto as Adeptus Minor (5°=6°), the first grade in the Second Order.
The contents, almost entirely by Crowley, ranged widely. “An Account of AA” “digested Eckhartshausen’s Cloud upon the Sanctuary, borrowing freely from Madame de Steiger’s translation. “Liber Librae” was an instruction on equilibrium, a lightly edited version of the GD’s Practicus 3°=8° paper on ethics.29 “Liber E,” aimed at the beginning student, gave basic instructions in journal-keeping, clairvoyance, and yoga, plus a recommended course of reading. Other pieces included “The Chymical Jousting of Brother Perardua” (an allegorical look at initiation), “At the Fork in the Roads” (a dramatization of Crowley’s encounter with Althea Gyles), “The Soldier and the Hunchback: ! and ?,” and Crowley’s serialized biography by Fuller, “The Temple of Solomon the King.” The special supplement featured Crowley’s “John St. John” diary.
Even though Crowley priced The Equinox at cost, the production by Simpkin Marshall was nevertheless expensive. Fifty subscription copies sold at one guinea, while another thousand, issued in boards, went for five shillings. Nevertheless, the book sold like hotcakes and would have made money if Crowley’s overhead wasn’t so high.30
Reactions to the journal varied as widely as its contents. Reviewers from small journals like Light and the Literary Guide considered it “expensively printed lunacy … in oriental-occidental jargon,” but the big guns praised it: Frank Harris, who had a stake as an Equinox contributor, considered it permanent in both production and value in his Vanity Fair review. The New Age offered a mixed review, calling it “finely unpopular,” but acknowledging it as “large and luxurious”; they recommended that readers to pick it up if only for Frank Harris’s “The Magic Glasses,” warning Crowley that “If The Equinox can live up to this standard it will be bought by the profane.”31 Meanwhile, the Morning Leader wrote:
It is a sort of thing no fellow can understand. One gathers vaguely out of the confusion that it deals with such things as Magic, wizardry, mysticism and so on … From frequent references to some people called The Brothers of the AA one gathers that they have a lot to do with this weird venture; but a grim perusal of an article purporting to explain the Order … leaves one without any real clue as to their identity.32
The Review of Reviews put it more succinctly: “A strange, weird, incomprehensible magazine is the Equinox, whose publication is a curious sign of the times.”33 These last reviews are probably how the typical reader took it: with confusion and consternation. Its message was clear enough to those who mattered, however, and with this publication the AA began to enroll students. Its first member was Victor Neuburg, who signed his Probationer’s Oath on April 8, taking the motto “Omnia Vincam” (I will conquer all):
I, Victor B. Neuburg, being of sound mind and body, on this 5th day of April 1909 … do hereby resolve: in the Presence of Perdurabo a neophyte of the AA To prosecute the Great Work: which is, to obtain a scientific knowledge of the nature and powers of my own being.
May the AA crown the work, lend me of Its wisdom in the work, enable me to understand the work!
Reverence, duty, sympathy, devotion, assiduity, trust do I bring to the AA and in one year from this date may I be admitted to the knowledge and conversation of the AA!34
Other students signing Probationer’s oaths included Richard Warren, Austin O. Spare, H. Sheridan Bickers, George Raffalovich, Everard Feilding, Herbert Inman, Charles Stansfeld Jones, and Kenneth Ward.
Richard Noel Warren (1882–1912) wrote the AA on May 16,35 enquiring about occult books, and within a month signed his Probationer’s oath. The first of Charles and Edith Warren’s three children, he was born in Heybridge, Surrey, during the winter of 1882, and as a young adult attended Bradfield College.36 On October 28 and 29, 1907, he took and passed his final examinations for the Law Society, becoming a solicitor in London.37 He also joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1908.38 As with many of the AA’s promising first crop of students, Neuburg dedicated a poem, “The Poet’s Song,” to him in The Triumph of Pan (1910). Although Warren contributed a review to the third issue of The Equinox, he finally quit on October 14, 1910—shortly after his one-year probationary period. He instead applied for membership in A. E. Waite’s version of the GD, the Independent and Rectified Order R.R. et A.C., on October 24 with the motto “Amor et Veritas.”39 He died on September 19, 1912, after ten days’ struggle with acute lobar pneumonia that developed into pericarditis.40
Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) was a handsome London artist with black curly hair and striking Mediterranean features. The fifth of six children born to London constable Philip Spare and his wife Eliza, his proclivity for drawing was encouraged by evening classes at the Lambeth Art School and later the Royal College of Art. At age seventeen, he sent two black-and-white drawings to the Royal Academy; both were accepted and one hung, making Spare the youngest exhibitor ever to be shown at the Royal Academy.41 The following year, 1905, the academy accepted a work titled “The Resurrection of Zoroaster,” which the press described as “a strange example of fantastic symbolism, gloomy, tragic and very original.”42 In 1905 he put out his first book, Earth Inferno, followed by Book of Satyrs (1907).43 By October 1907, at age twenty, his first exhibition—at the Brunton Gallery in London’s West End—caused quite a stir, causing The Art Journal, in its February 1908 issue, to proclaim, “There must be few people in London interested in art who do not know the name of Austin Osman Spare.”44 When Crowley apparently sought him out45 in 1909, he was working on his masterwork, The Book of Pleasure,46 which Freud would call “one of the most significant revelations of subconscious mechanisms that had appeared in modern times.”47 Spare joined the AA on July 10, 1909, as Yihoveaum, a motto that merged the great Hebrew and Sanskrit holy words Jehovah and om. Although Crowley, for a time, called Spare hi
s favorite student,48 Spare stayed with the AA but briefly, contributing two drawings to the second issue of The Equinox. Disappointed, Crowley felt Spare could not understand the system; however, Spare probably left because his own philosophy of magic—involving automatic drawing, sigilization, and the dual concepts of Zos (the body considered as a whole) and Kia (the atmospheric “I”)—was already fully developed and at variance with Crowley’s ideas at the time. As Ansell has suggested, Spare’s artistic ethos of blurring and defying categories was not well suited to Crowley’s highly structured system.49
Horace Algernon Sheridan-Bickers (1883–1957)50 signed up on July 23, choosing the motto “Superabo” (I will excel). He was recently divorced from his first wife, Hermione Henrietta Margaret, and remarried to Minnie Elizabeth Hefford (b. 1880), who went by the name Betty.51 While a student, Sheridan-Bickers was president of the Cambridge University Sociological Society and, as a doctor of laws,52 a frequent lecturer at the Eighty Club, a group within Britain’s Liberal Party that promoted political education and organization during the years 1880 to 1978.53 In November 1909, Sheridan-Bickers also lectured for The Equinox at Cambridge University, where he became acquainted with Crowley’s lifelong friend, Louis Umfreville Wilkinson.54 He was also announced as lecturing on behalf of The Equinox throughout 1910.55 From there, Sheridan-Bickers would travel to British Columbia, lecturing, working as a journalist, editing The Spokesman magazine, and helping establish Crowley’s magical organizations.56 He would soon resettle in Los Angeles, working as a journalist for the Los Angeles Examiner,57 continuing lecturing,58 and writing the story and screenplay for the motion picture Her Body in Bond (1918).59 The latter is about “a show girl (of course she is poor but honest) who, in her efforts to save the life of her consumptive husband, is subjected to the insults of those who want to force money upon her—for a reason.”60 Working from Los Angeles, he would become established as a drama critic for the London Daily Express and, under the pen-name “Yorick,” edited Theatre World and Illustrated Stage Review in the 1920s.61 For a time, he was also managing editor of Hollywood Life: An International Journal of Motion Pictures.62 While in Los Angeles, he and Betty served as Crowley’s representatives in Hollywood, playing an important role in promoting Crowley’s works. H. Sheridan-Bickers appears in the Confessions as “Gnaggs” in a long and obscure story about jealousy and herpes.63 He died in San Mateo, California, on August 2, 1957.
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