Author George Raffalovich (1880–1958) joined the AA on August 11 as Frater Audeo et Gaudeo (I dare and I rejoice). Born in Cannes to Ukranian Jewish banker Gregor Raffalovich, his father died in Paris in 1881 shortly after George’s birth.64 His mother was reputedly a countess descended from one of Napoleon’s ministers of finance, and George squandered his fortune on wild extravagances like buying a circus. Fortunately, his family had set money aside for him, and they pulled him out of the hole and set him back on his feet.65 He had a Bachelier ès Lettres from Nancy-Université,66 and when Crowley met him in London, Raffalovich was living in Putney and associated with Vanity Fair magazine.67 He had recently published Planetary Journeys and Earthly Sketches (1908)—of which British novelist and political activist Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) wrote “Your trips to a Planet betray, if I may say so, a very modern feeling of the plasticity of the universe, together with a sense of the comparative values which to my mind is the highest manifestation of the human reason”68—followed by “Nadia,” a short story of the Russian Revolution, in The Idler.69 AC found him a gentleman with “a remarkable imagination and a brilliant ability to use the bizarre.”70 Seeing some of himself in Raffalovich—he had also spent his fortune and quarreled with his family, and now professed great interest and knowledge in magic—Crowley helped him to become naturalized in 1910. Raffalovich repaid the money AC lent him in cash, and immortalized him in his stories as Elphenor Pistouillat de la Ratisboisière.71 He contributed regularly to The Equinox,72 and participated in its London activities. Neuburg dedicated two pieces in The Triumph of Pan73 to him as well.
George Raffalovich (1880–1958) in 1921. (photo credit 8.1)
Hon. Francis Henry Everard Joseph Feilding (1867–1936, commonly misspelled “Fielding”) was an eleventh-generation descendant of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. The second son of the 8th Earl of Denbigh Rudolph William Basil Feilding (1823–1892) and Mary Berkeley (d. 1901), he was brother to the current 9th Earl of Denbigh, Rudolph Robert Basil Aloysius Augustine Feilding. Everard Feilding had served as a midshipman in the Royal Navy and fought in the Egypt Campaign in 1882. Educated at Oscott, he was admitted to Trinity College in 1887, earned his bachelors of law degree in 1890, and was called to the bar in 1894.74 Friends recalled him as “full of humour, possessed of very unusual abilities, well read, fond of argument in conversation, and with a fund of information on all the varied things in life he had come across.”75 He was also a gifted musician, able to sight-read the most difficult selections. He was also active as Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research from 1903 to 1920. After his brother Basil died in a boating accident in August 1906, Feilding’s interest heightened, and he obtained “a reasonably extensive experience in the investigation of psychical phenomena and the advantage of a fairly complete education at the hands of fraudulent mediums.”76 He is well known as one of the investigators of Italian spiritualist medium Eusapia Palladino (1854–1918) in Naples; although initially convinced of her abilities, Feilding returned for another investigation in 1910 and concluded that she was a fraud.77 As the character Lord Anthony Bowling in Moonchild, Crowley calls Feilding a familiar friend.
He was a stout and strong man of nearly fifty years of age, with a gaze both intrepid and acute.… Haughtiness was here, and great good-nature; the intellect was evidently developed to the highest possible pitch of which man is capable; and one could read the judicial habit on his deep wide brows. Against this one could see the huge force of the man’s soul, the passionate desire for knowledge which burnt in that great brain.…
This man was the mainstay of the Society for Psychical Research. He was the only absolutely competent man in it.78
He joined the AA on August 21, selecting as his motto “Ut Deum Inveniam” (That I will meet with God). With the onset of World War I, Feilding—as a barrister, a member of the Committee of Naval Censors’ Press Bureau, and a Lieutenant in the Special Intelligence Department—would prove a valuable contact for Crowley.
Herbert Edward Inman was an engineer who had been elected to the Liverpool Engineering Society on November 29, 1905; he would go on to serve as a private with the Royal Engineers during World War I, receiving the Allied Victory and British War medals.79 Inman joined the AA on October 22, 1909, as Frater Amor Clavis Vitae (Love is the Key to Life). Although he recruited one other member, he soon faded from the AA’s ranks. Although Inman reportedly broke with Crowley over a bad debt,80 the two remained in touch even in the 1940s.81
Charles Robert John Stansfeld Jones (1886–1950) became a probationer on December 24, taking the motto Unus in Omnibus (One in all), or VIO, in Fuller’s presence. Jones was born in London on April 2, 1886, and baptized on June 1 at Saint Luke’s in Chelsea, the youngest of seven children to iron merchant William John Jones and his wife Eliza.82 In the summer of 1907 he married Prudence R. Wratton (born c. 1888), and several years later adopted a daughter, Deirdre, and son, Anthony.83 Although he had sung in a choir, at age twenty he decided to disprove the tenets of mysticism; instead, the systems he sought to discredit fascinated him. In 1909 he bought The Equinox and joined the AA. He met Crowley at this time, but his primary instructor was Fuller. In May 1910, he moved to British Columbia, where he worked as an accountant and quickly became one of Crowley’s most devoted followers; in later years, when a friend discovered Jones at the roadside staring sadly at his broken-down Ford, this acquaintance snidely suggested reading AC’s erotic verse to the car. Jones replied, “I’ve already tried that, but she just drips oil.”
Finally, there was Kenneth Martin Ward (1887–1927), whom Crowley had previously met at Wastdale Head during the winter of 1908. Friends described him as “Amazingly clever and full of the weirdest conglomeration of beliefs.”84 Born in 1887 in Cambridge to James and Mary Jane Ward,85 he stood over six feet tall and dressed unconventionally. He was a well-rounded scholar and sportsman from Emmanuel who entered Cambridge in October 1906 on a physics and chemistry scholarship and got first class marks in his mathematics tripos. Besides intellectual pursuits, Ward was also an avid gymnast, boxer, and swimmer. Taking up sea-cliff climbing as an undergraduate, he made several historical ascents and, during a visit to the chalk cliffs of Wastdale Head that winter, met Crowley. Returning to school to find math and physics spiritually unsatisfying, he ventured instead into literature, philosophy, and art. This ultimately led him to pursue, through Crowley, an introduction to the Pan Society. He became one of the AA’s earliest members on May 25, 1909, actively recruiting three more probationers and helping to found the Cambridge Freethought Association to host Crowley’s talks. (Ward himself was the president, and Pinsent and Neuburg the committee.) Neuburg dedicated “The Thinker” in his The Triumph of Pan to Ward.
Ward visited Crowley at Boleskine the summer of 1909 to discuss both business and pleasure. With the second issue of The Equinox in the works, AC turned his mind toward the third, fourth, and fifth issues, with plans to explain John Dee’s Enochian magic. Since they were both climbers, conversation soon turned to sports. Ward mentioned he would like to learn to ski, and Crowley, who’d learned to skate and ski during his winters in St. Moritz, promised Ward one of his spare pairs of skis.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember where he had placed either his Enochian tablets or his skis.
Rummaging through his attic on June 28, Crowley found more than he bargained for. Yes, he located the Enochian tablets. He even ran across his skis. Moreover, among the other items in storage, he found a nearly forgotten, long-lost relic: the original manuscript of The Book of the Law.
Kenneth Martin Ward (1887–1927). (photo credit 8.2)
An eerie feeling settled over Crowley as he looked at the pages. Up to that point, he had been working off a typescript of the book, assuming the original had been lost. But now …
As a Magister Templi, he was sworn to interpret every event as a dealing of God with his life. So what of this? Crowley reasoned that, just as the masters made sure he became intereste
d in mountaineering so he could discover the GD, they now ensured that Ward would enter the picture and lead to the rediscovery of The Book of the Law. This event was designed, and it was of the utmost significance. It forced Crowley to take a more serious look at the book than he ever had before. He realized this was more than his destiny: it was his True Will.
CHAPTER NINE
The Vision and the Voice
His faith in the Secret Chiefs and their message renewed, Crowley returned to London with his students and took a flat at 124 Victoria Street as the offices of The Equinox. He decorated the rooms with red curtains, a stuffed crocodile, and several Buddhas, then began work on the second issue. It appeared on the autumnal equinox, September 20, 1909, with a colorful assortment of articles: Crowley contributed an essay on the psychology of hashish as “Oliver Haddo,” his fictitious counterpart in Maugham’s The Magician. Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) offered the short story “A Sphinx at Gizeh,”1 Neuburg “The Lost Shepherd,” Crowley’s Cambridge follower G. H. S. Pinsent2 “The Organ in King’s Chapel, Cambridge,” Allan Bennett “A Note on Genesis,” and George Raffalovich “The Man-Cover.” Spare provided illustrations for the article “A Handbook of Geomancy.” Most significantly, Fuller, under Crowley’s supervision, contributed the second installment of “The Temple of Solomon the King.” This chapter recounted Crowley’s initiation into the GD, reproducing every one of its First Order rituals. Crowley believed the Secret Chiefs had released him from his vow of secrecy; as The Book of the Law put it: “Behold! the rituals of the old time are black.”3 By publishing these secrets, he dissipated their power in favor of the new order.
The Veil of Isis was lifted, and the whole world looked on the undergarments of the GD. Crowley promised to remove even these in the next issue, which would contain the remainder of the GD corpus.
Meanwhile, Clouds without Water appeared under the pseudonym of Reverend C. Verey. The book is a farce, supposedly edited from a private manuscript to reveal the horrors to which Satan can drive lost sheep. Its preface contains the odd semibiographical lines, “the wife of the man, driven to drink and prostitution by the inhuman cruelty of his mistress,” paralleling Crowley’s personal problems. Poetry formed the bulk of the text, with ridiculously pious end notes on its content (“only a Latin dictionary can unveil the loathsome horror” of the word “fellatrix”). It closes with a prayer for redemption.
While many of the poems grew out of his affair with Lola (Vera Bentrovata), Crowley loses sight of her part way through and recalls Rodin’s student, sculptress Kathleen Bruce. Poems V, VI, and VII are for her, and her name even appears as an acrostic in the opening “Terzain”:
King of myself, I labour to espouse
An equal soul. Alas! how frail I find
The golden light within the gilded house.
Helpless and passionate, and weak of mind!
Lechers and lepers!—all as ivy cling,
Emasculate the healthy bole they haunt.
Eternity is pregnant; I shall sing
Now—by my power—a spirit grave and gaunt
Brilliant and selfish, hard and hot, to flaunt
Reared like a flame across the lampless west,
Until by love or laughter we enchaunt,
Compel ye to Kithairon’s thorny crest—
Evoe! Iacche! consummatum est.
Her new husband, explorer Robert Scott, was reportedly furious to find his wife’s name in this bizarre book.
The sharp division between Crowley’s private and magical lives was more pronounced than ever. Although magic proceeded well, he nevertheless spent much of that summer in the Thames valley, brooding over his forthcoming divorce. As he put it, “My soul was badly bruised by the ruin of my romance.”4 Seeking solace in his childhood nostalgia for weirs, Crowley spent time late that summer in a canoe on Boulter’s Lock, Maidenhead, on the Thames thirty miles west of London. There, in a sixty-hour marathon session, he wrote his classic mystic poem, “Aha!” In the form of a dialogue between the teacher Marsyas (Crowley) and his pupil Olympas (any seeker), it describes the many mystical states he had experienced along the path to becoming a Master of the Temple, including the subjects of equilibrium, the veil of matter (paroketh), the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel, the vision of the universal peacock (atmadarshana), the ordeal of the Abyss, the vanity of speech, the destruction of the ego, and the bliss of transcendence (ananda). In particular, his discussion of the ordeal of the Abyss poignantly mirrors the heartache he was feeling as he penned these verses:
MARSYAS. Easy to say. To abandon all,
All must be first loved and possessed.
Nor thou nor I have burst the thrall.
All—as I offered half in jest,
Sceptic—was torn away from me.
Not without pain! THEY slew my child, Dragged my wife down to infamy
Loathlier than death, drove to the wild
My tortured body, stripped me of
Wealth, health, youth, beauty, ardour, love.
Thou hast abandoned all? Then try
A speck of dust within the !eye!
With his divorce pending, Crowley was vividly aware of the demands of the path he had chosen: he had thrown away his family and fortune to lead the life of a magician. “Aha!” stands not only as autobiography, but as a manual of spiritual attainment.
As the date of his divorce approached, Crowley grew increasingly miserable. If the event itself wasn’t bad enough, Rose was now seeking forgiveness and a second chance. He had managed to refuse so far, but knew he would eventually break down if she persisted. Thus he left town until the whole unpleasant business was over.
On November 10, 1909, Crowley and Neuburg left London for a walking vacation in Algeria. They arrived in Algiers a week later, purchased provisions, and headed south with no plan other than to rough it a few days in a new place. They camped in the open for two nights and slept in a primitive hotel a third before arriving at Aumale, about sixty miles southeast of Algiers, on November 21. The place felt right, so they bought notebooks and settled in.
Going through his rucksack, Crowley examined the papers he had brought on Enochian magic. He planned to publish them in a future Equinox, but they now held a greater usefulness for him. Recalling his abortive attempts at doing the Thirty Calls during his visit to Mexico nine years ago, he realized a lot had changed since 1900. He was a Master of the Temple now. Perhaps the barriers that once blocked the 28th Aethyr from him would now yield.
After dinner on November 23, Crowley and Neuburg found a secluded place in the desert. AC removed his scarlet calvary cross inset with a huge topaz. He gazed into the stone while concentrating on his third eye, the ajna chakra, and when he felt prepared to receive a vision, he began the 28th Call in the Angelic Language: “Madariatza das perifa BAG cahisa micaolazoda saanire caosago od fifisa balzodizodarasa Iaida.” In English, it meant, “The heavens that dwell in the 28th Aire are mighty in the Parts of the Earth, and execute the judgement of the Highest!” Completing the conjuration, he gazed into the topaz and described what he saw and the words that came to him. Neuburg, with pen and notebook, recorded what followed:
There cometh an Angel into the stone with opalescent shining garments like a wheel of fire on every side of him, and in his hand is a long flail of scarlet lightning; his face is black, and his eyes white without any pupil or iris. The face is very terrible indeed to look upon. Now in front of him is a wheel, with many spokes, and many tyres; it is like a fence in front of him.
And he cries: O man, who art thou that wouldst penetrate the Mystery? for it is hidden unto the End of Time.5
And so it began. The entire vision lasted an hour.
The Edinburgh courtroom came to order on November 24 to hear the uncontested complaint of Rose Edith Crowley (formerly Skerrett, née Kelly) against her husband, Edward Alexander Crowley, a.k.a. Lord Boleskine and Count MacGregor. Lord Edward Theodore Salvesen (1857–1942)6 listened carefully from the be
nch as the thirty-five-year-old pursuer gave her testimony, from her 1897 marriage, her elopement six years later, the birth of their first daughter, her abandonment in China, and the death of their child. Mr. Jameson, who questioned Rose, asked, “When you met the defendant, was he then calling himself Aleister Crowley?”
She shook her head. “No, he was then Count Svareff. I knew, however, his real name was Edward Alexander Crowley. Later he called himself MacGregor in order to identify himself with Scotland. That’s the name he used on our marriage certificate, although he gave his father’s name as Edward Crowley. Shortly after we were wed, he began using the name Lord Boleskine. He said it was because Scots took the names of their property.”
“I take it he is a little eccentric?”
“Oh, yes!”
The damning evidence came when she described her complaint against Crowley. That summer, on July 21, she left him and took a house on Warwick Road because he had been beating her. Two weeks later, according to testimony from Mrs. Dauby the charwoman (whom Crowley had called a drunken ex-prostitute), Master Crowley had a woman with him: he had asked Dauby to bring them tea in the library that evening, and again in the morning. Throughout the night, she heard laughter coming from the room. If that weren’t scandalous enough, the chauffeur, Charles Randle, testified that Crowley had fathered a child by a friend of his. When Gerald Kelly took the stand, he confessed that, although he was Crowley’s friend, he knew little about his background. AC, he said, purchased Boleskine for far more than its worth; the manor had a lot of land, but most of it was perpendicular. Crowley, he said, was very stupid about money.
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