Marston asked the obvious question: “Will nation rise up against nation?” Bartzabel, through Neuburg, warned them that two wars would break out within the next five years. The first would center on Turkey, the second in Germany. The conflicts would destroy both nations. (The prediction would prove to be correct, with the Balkan War in 1912 and World War I in 1914.)
Although the ritual was an unqualified success—it was the most startling and concrete magical result Crowley had known so far—its significance comes from neither Neuburg’s channeling nor the accurate prediction. The ritual is important because Marston, impressed with the ceremony, half-jokingly suggested they charge admission and perform it publicly. Crowley’s eyes lit up, and he replied, “I think you may be on to something.”
While the spirit of Mars foretold war, a smaller battle brewed at Trinity College. Dean Reginald St. John Parry (1858–1935)1 received a letter claiming Crowley was a pederast and was being followed by the police (the recent publication of AC’s homosexual Bagh-i-Muattar doubtlessly prompted the rumor). Hearing claims that police were following him, Crowley responded with a flip “Good, I shan’t be burgled.”
Parry, gravely concerned about the moral character of this frequent campus visitor, summoned Norman Mudd to his office. Mudd, aside from being a Crowley devotee, was also secretary of the Cambridge Freethought Association, which Ward had formed under AC’s direction to host his talks on campus. Dean Parry—explaining that he objected not to Crowley’s talks but to his morality—instructed Mudd to cancel the Freethought Association’s invitation and cease distributing copies of The Star in the West. Given that AC had just won a popular court case, Parry chose his words carefully to avoid slander.
Outraged, Mudd summoned the Freethought Association’s other members, who sent their rebellious reply to the Dean:
The Association having taken into consideration the request made to it by the Dean of Trinity regrets that it finds itself unable to comply with the request. It regards the right to invite down any person it thinks fit as essential to its principles and wishes to point out that its attitude towards any opinions advocated before it is purely critical.2
Crowley, meanwhile, fumed that someone—a “Parry-lytic Liar,” as Crowley dubbed him3—should accuse him behind his back: shades of Champney! So he wrote Mudd’s father, claiming his son’s tutors were “indulging in things so abominable that among decent people they have not even a name,”4 and recommended he place his son in the charge of more probitous tutors. That summer, Crowley came to Cambridge as scheduled.
Having failed to control the Freethought Association, Parry had no recourse but to single out one of them and issue an ultimatum. Indeed, Parry has been criticized “for a certain peremptoriness and a tendency to override opposition.”5 The ax fell on Mudd: he was to resign as secretary of the Freethought Association, write the dean a letter of apology, and promise on his honor as a gentleman never again to contact Aleister Crowley. If he refused, Parry would cancel his scholarship.
Mudd crumbled. As he later recounted, “I will not go into details as to the fight I put up. It was stubborn but unskillful and I was compelled ultimately to give in. You must understand that at this time I was quite poor, having gone up to Cambridge only with the help of scholarships.”6 That scholarship was his only means of staying in college, and his parents were already hundreds of pounds in debt over his other educational expenses. Set on an academic career, he had no choice but to comply: to resign and apologize. However, he secretly maintained his correspondence with Crowley.
Cambridge banned Crowley, and the battle was over for now. The incident would prompt AC’s poetic critique “Athanasius Contra Decanum,” eventually published in The Equinox.
On an idle evening with idle guests, Crowley posed a challenge to Leila Waddell, the Mother of Heaven: he would read a poem, and ask her to play a composition that reflected its mood. It became a call-response, with Crowley rifling through his library and Leila running through her repertoire to find responses to the other’s statements. The evening turned into an artistic dialogue, with even the observers intrigued, entertained, and excited.
In the silent moments following the conversation, Crowley was spiritually charged and uplifted. So, he learned, were his friends. It felt as though they’d just done some powerful, primal ritual. Notions from this performance and the ritual at Marston’s house met and joined: Neuburg’s dance, Leila’s music, and Crowley’s poetry were all powerful adjuncts to dramatic ritual. Based on this sketchy theme, AC wrote two poems to the Mother of Heaven: “The Interpreter” and “Pan to Artemis.” Both are frenetic and infectious invocations:
Uncharmable charmer
Of Bacchus and Mars
In the sounding rebounding
Abyss of the stars!
O virgin in armour,
Thine arrows unsling
In the brilliant resilient
First rays of the spring!
By the force of the fashion
Of love, when I broke
Through the shroud, through the cloud,
Through the storm, through the smoke,
To the mountain of passion
Volcanic that woke—
By the rage of the mage
I invoke, I invoke!7
On August 23 these elements coalesced into the Rite of Artemis, performed at the Equinox offices for the press and public. Its name and form were more than a passing nod to the Matherses’ “Rite of Isis” in Paris a decade before.
With lights dimmed, incense burning, and all clad in their magical robes, the rite began with the banishing ritual of the pentagram and purifications of the temple with water and fire. With the space duly cleared and consecrated, Crowley led the others in a circumambulation around the altar. One brother passed the Cup of Libation around the room while another recited poetry. After invoking Artemis via the Greater Ritual of the Hexagram, another libation celebrated the deity. A third libation followed AC’s reading of “Song of Orpheus” from Argonauts.
Speculation surrounds the contents of this libation: although reporter Raymond Radclyffe described the concoction as pleasant smelling, attendee Ethel Wieland said it tasted like rotten apples and made her intoxicated for a week. The liquid clearly contained some active ingredient, for Neuburg wrote to the Wielands after the performance, “I am glad the effects of the drug have passed off from Mrs. Wieland and yourself.”8 Neuburg’s biographer Jean Overton Fuller claimed the drug was opium, although Crowley himself gave the best explanation: to generate a bacchic exuberance without intoxicating patrons with wine, he opted instead for “the elixir introduced by me to Europe”—Anhalonium lewinii or mescal buttons infused with herbs, fruit juices, and alcohol—with instructions to skip anyone who showed signs of drunkenness. At this time, no laws prohibited the use of such substances.
Following the preliminaries, the brethren led in and enthroned on a high seat the Mother of Heaven. Solemn and reverent, Crowley recited Swinburne’s first chorus from “Atalanta.”9 Another libation, an invocation to Artemis, and further ceremonies followed. The rite took on a greater energy when Crowley commanded Neuburg to dance “the dance of Syrinx and Pan in honour of our lady Artemis.” Neuburg danced with beauty and grace until he collapsed from exhaustion in the middle of the room, staying there for the remainder of the rite. Crowley recited another poem to Artemis, and after a deathly silence, the Mother of Heaven took her Guarnerius violin and played. Her performance was sensual, subtle, masterful. The stunned audience was wafted away by the very ecstasy Crowley had hoped to produce.
The long, intense silence ended when Crowley announced, “By the Power in me vested I declare the Temple closed.”
Raymond Radclyffe reviewed the ceremony for the August 24 edition of The Sketch, calling it “beautifully conceived and beautifully carried out. If there is any higher form of artistic expression than great verse and great music, I have yet to learn it.”10 Radclyffe hailed from an old and distinguished family, beginnin
g as a financial journalist and editor at St. Stepehen’s Review, where his partner, William Allison, called him “a singularly able man.”11 As a signatory on the paper’s parent company, Radclyffe was named in a libel suit against St. Stephen’s Review; although protesting innocence, the lawsuit and other financial troubles doomed the paper.12 He personally suffered financially, appearing in court to account for over £5,000 in unpaid debt.13 He recovered and continued to write, contributing to London’s Financial Times and publishing his memoir, Wealth and Cats, in 1898.14 During the 1910s he would go on to be financial editor for the New Witness, regular financial commentator for The English Review, and author of The War and Finance;15 he beame so influential that his word could bolster how the public perceived the integrity of any new company or undertaking.16
According to AC, Radclyffe, “though utterly indifferent to Magick, was passionately fond of poetry and thought mine first-class, and unrivalled in my generation.”17 Theirs was a deep friendship, Crowley writing appreciatively of him, “he was one of the very best that ever lived; a City Editor straight as Euclid before Einstein attacked him, and one of the best literary critics and friends in the world.”18 This explained his presence at the Rite of Artemis, and AC appreciated the good review, inscribing a copy of Clouds without Water to “Raymond Radclyffe from his grateful friend Aleister Crowley.”19
Financial writer and editor Raymond Radclyffe, c. 1898. (photo credit 10.1)
Radclyffe’s positive review encouraged Crowley to compose and perform an entire series of rites. Although Fuller and his friends urged Crowley to leave well enough alone, Crowley stubbornly rented a room at Westminster’s Caxton Hall. To this respectable venue accustomed to whist drives, subscription dances, and meetings of the fledgling suffragettes, Crowley planned to introduce incense, music, chanting, and dancing for the ritual of all rituals.
As the AA geared up for a new issue of The Equinox and its forthcoming engagement at Caxton Hall, several new faces entered the picture that summer.
Ethel Archer, an aspiring poet in her early twenties, came aboard early enough to attend the Rite of Artemis. Ethel Florence E. Archer (b. 1885) was the fourth of five children, born in Slougham, Sussex, to Ormond A. Archer, curate of Whitbourne, and his wife, Emily.20 Although she had written The Book of Plain Cooking,21 she sought creative outlets through fiction and poetry. In 1908 she married artist Eugene John Wieland (c. 1880–1915), son of Thomas Thatcher and Eugenie Wieland of Sunnyfield House, Guisborough, Yorkshire;22 she nicknamed him “Bunco.” They were passionate lovers, as anonymously documented in a popular article written by a neighbor who watched their unselfconscious behavior through the open window of their “shabby old garret,” which was furnished with little more than an easel, two chairs, and a mirror.23 Both Ethel and Eugene became heavily involved with both OTO and AA at this time, and Crowley would encourage Eugene to set up the publishing imprint Wieland & Co., which over the next couple of years would bring out subsequent issues of The Equinox, and several of Crowley’s other works.24 Archer’s contributions to The Equinox were limited to love poems, and Neuburg, noting that these addressed women, teasingly dubbed her Sappho; meanwhile, she was surprised that someone as fey as Neuburg would point the finger. Although she explained to everybody’s satisfaction that her poems described how she imagined a man might see her, she nevertheless adopted Sappho as her colorful moniker. Both Neuburg and Crowley intrigued her, and she spent long hours at the Equinox offices. Both she and Wieland would eventually part with Crowley, and Wieland would go on to serve with the 19th Battalion in the Great War, reaching the rank of sergeant. He would die in a Canadian hospital on October 5, 1915, as a result of injuries sustained at Loos, and be buried at Le Treport Military Cemetery.25 Archer would continue to publish occasional books, poetry, and essays throughout her life.26
As one of Chelsea’s great hostesses, Elizabeth Gwendolen Otter (1876–1958)27 considered herself unshockable. Her Sunday luncheons attracted all manner of actors, painters, and writers; she even took in her fair share of them. A friend introduced her to Crowley because of her fascination with the odd and unconventional. AC was an admirable addition to her collection of personalities, and the magician became good friends with this plain-looking woman who claimed descent from Pocahontas. She contributed her opinions to the book review section of The Equinox,28 while he in turn dedicated “The Ghouls”29 to her and portrayed her in Moonchild (1929) as Mrs. Badger.
Vittoria Cremers could have been a storybook figure: she was born Vittoria Cassini around 1859 in Pisa to the Italian Manrico Vittorio Cassini and his British wife, Elizabeth Rutherford. Vittoria made her way to New York, where she was proprietor and editor of the Stage Gazette. Around February 1886 she married Russia’s Baron Louis Cremers, who was the son of a famous St. Petersburg banking family, the Rothschilds, with a net worth of $40 million. A couple of weeks after the wedding, she reportedly told her husband that she “could not possibly love any man.”30 It was at this time that he learned of her habit of going out on the town dressed as a man, and Crowley later reports that “She boasted of her virginity and of the intimacy of her relations with Mabel Collins, with whom she lived a long time.”31 The Baron and Cremers soon separated, then divorced; Vittoria got a butch haircut and began answering simply to “Cremers.” Mabel Collins (1851–1927) was a Theosophist and novelist whose novel The Blossom and the Fruit (1890) Crowley admired enough to include in the AA reading list; he considered it “the best existing account of the Theosophic theories presented in dramatic form.”32 While Collins and Crowley never met, their mutual acquaintance Cremers doubtlessly saw parallels: Just as Crowley was editor of The Equinox, Collins was H. P. Blavatsky’s coeditor of the Theosophical periodical Lucifer. And just as Crowley claimed to scribe various “Holy Books” dictated by the Secret Chiefs, so too did Collins claim that her books Idyll of the White Lotus (1884), Light on the Path (1885), and Through the Gates of Gold (1887) were dictated by Koot Hoomi, one of the Masters or Mahatmas who guided Blavatsky.33 Cremers often repeated Collins’s claim to know the identity of Jack the Ripper, and Crowley preserved the claim in “Jack the Ripper.”34
Cremers was a sincere but penniless seeker, transcribing 777 in New York’s Astor Library because she could not afford to purchase a copy. She wished to help “put the Order over,” as Crowley called it, so AC paid her passage to England and introduced her to his circle. Aged in her fifties, she had white hair and unhappy eyes. Her stern, square face, yellow and hard, reminded Crowley of wrinkled parchment. When she boasted of her undercover work against New York’s drug and prostitution rings, Crowley could more readily believe that she directed drug and prostitution traffic than fought it. “Crowley is one of three things,” she once said of her mentor. “He is either mad, or he is a blackguard, or he is the greatest adept.”35
Crowley also got to know W. E. Hayter Preston (b. 1891), a close friend of the Neuburg family, who acted as Victor’s watchdog. Like Victor, he was a Freethinker and poet. Although he worked as a freelance journalist, he soon became literary editor at the Sunday Referee. Preston, who studied Lévi and the French magicians before he ever met Neuburg, took a dim view of Crowley. A dinner with AC and his mother helped solidify this opinion: according to Preston, Crowley snatched the menu out of his mother’s hands and, closing it, told her, “Mother, you may have boiled toads. Or fried Jesu.”36
Jeanne Eugenie Heyse (1890–1912) was a young actress and dancer at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, her tuition paid by a local businessman. She was the oldest of three sisters, born in Edmonton, Middlesex, to Holland-born wholesale merchant Ferdinand Francis E. Heyse and his Irish wife, Margaret.37 Under her stage name Ione de Forest, her major previous experience was playing The Blue Bird (1909) by Belgian playwright and winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Literature Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949). Joan, as she preferred to be called, had no interest in the occult, but she entered Crowley’s circle when she answered an ad in Stage seeking dancers for a pe
rformance at Caxton Hall. Her body was as gaunt and cadaverous, and the pale powders she wore made her anemic skin even more pallid. Black hair dangled to her slight waist, and golden eyes beamed vacantly from her oval face. Beautiful and sweet, she could be manic one moment, melancholic the next. Indeed, two years later her newlywed husband would describe her: “She was in poor health, highly strung, and occasionally suffered from hysteria.”38 Although considered a wooden and untalented dancer by some, her lover, American expatriate modernist poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972), offered the following portrait in his “Dance Figure”:
Dark-eyed,
O woman of my dreams,
Ivory sandalled,
There is none like thee among the dancers,
None with swift feet.39
This tragic doll of a woman appealed to both AC and Neuburg, and she got the job.
With Leila, Ethel, Gwen, Joan, and Vittoria always around, these students became known as “the Harem.” Crowley would work hard at his desk—on another issue of The Equinox or one of his students’ books, such as The History of a Soul and The Deuce and All by Raffalovich, The Whirlpool by Archer, or The Triumph of Pan by Neuburg—while Joan stood behind him, running her fingers through his hair and calling him “Aleister,” even though everybody referred to him as AC. Except for the Mother of Heaven: with her accent, it sounded like “IC.” Her speech invariably prompted Crowley to declare, “Oh, Mother, I do wish you’d lose that accent. It sounds so bad in the Rites!” Although said in jest, it prompted Leila to ask Gwen for help with her dialect: “Will you tell me when I sy anything in Austreyelian?”40
Occasionally the Vickybird, as Neuburg was dubbed, would look up from his desk and make some offhand pun about Archer’s sapphic tendencies, excusing himself with “If you’ll pardon the ostroloboguosity.” No week passed without Victor using this, his favorite word. Having had his say, he would return to business, reading page proofs or tossing coal onto the fire with his fingers. Both activities kept his fingers blackened, and when things got slow, Crowley would march over to his desk and paternally demand, “Victor, let me see your fingers.” In response, Neuburg would adopt a childlike posture, hiding his hands behind his back and replying, “Shan’t.”
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