Irish poet Aleister Crowley, from The Fatherland. (photo credit 12.4)
Chinese poet Kwaw Li Ya. (photo credit 12.5)
And why shouldn’t Crowninshield have treated him well? Ever since Crowley left him speechless by correctly guessing the birth date of every guest at a party, he knew there was something special about this Englishman. Crowley did not disappoint him with his contributions. His first publication with Vanity Fair was a clever interpretation of baseball from the devout Hindu’s point of view: “A Hindu at the Polo Grounds: A Letter from Mahatma Sri Paramananda Guru Swamiji (Great Soul Saint Supreme-Bliss Teacher Learned Person) to His Brother in India.”72 Crowley appeared in the same issue as the Peking professor Kwaw Li Ya; in the August 1915 issue, Kwaw Li described the haiku and offered $10 for the best contribution from readers on the subject of the Manhattan skyline. It began a regular stream of Vanity Fair contributions from Crowley.
Around this time, Crowley decided he wanted a son. Thus Jeanne’s early September return to New York overjoyed him. Calling her, at her request, by the magical name “Hilarion,” they conducted several acts of sex magick with the intent of begetting a child. On the autumnal equinox, they received the word NEBULAE as an oracle for the next six months. As Jeanne seduced him, Crowley succumbed while concentrating on this password.
When Jeanne next left New York on October 6, it was with Crowley, heading for the West Coast on a “honeymoon.” While Jeanne and her invalid husband went straight to California, Crowley took various side trips, planning to catch up and sneak off with her as circumstance permitted. Thus, Crowley traveled to Detroit to tour the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical plant, which prepared for him a tincture of Anhalonium lewinii. Proceeding to Chicago, Paul Carus gave him a tour of the Windy City. By October 12, Crowley arrived in Vancouver, where he helped establish Agape Lodge as OTO’s foundling North American headquarters. He also performed a ceremony to advance Jones to the AA grade of Babe of the Abyss, on his way to Magister Templi (8°=3°).
According to AA rules, Crowley’s finding a successor as Magister Templi entitled him to advance to the grade of Magus. The Magus was a special attainment, as only seven others in the past had ever attained the grade and founded a religion: Lao Tzu’s Taoism; Thoth’s Egyptian mysteries; Krishna’s Vedanta; Gautama’s Buddhism; Moses’ Judaism; the suffering and slain pattern of Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Jesus, and Dionysus; and the Islamic religion of Mohammed. Crowley joined this elevated company as the eighth Magus in the history of humankind. As a Magus, Crowley’s task was to speak a magical word representing the core of his teaching, thus symbolically destroying the world in fire. Just as Lao Tzu’s word was tao, and Buddha’s word was dukkha, Crowley’s was Thelema.
As a Magus, residing in the House of the Juggler, Crowley chose for himself the magical identity that shaped so much of his life: To Mega Therion, the Great Beast, 666. According to magical and kabbalistic tradition, the number 666 is a sacred number attributed to the sun. Traditionally, the sun’s basic number is six. Thus, 36, which is 6 × 6, is an extension of the sun, while 666, the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 36, provides the number derived from the magical square of the sun. The Great Beast, he believed, was no evil force. Years of study showed him that Revelation was written in gnostic and kabbalistic symbols, and that its text described Christianity’s succession by a new religion whose prophet was the Great Beast.
This creature was a necessary part of magical tradition: Christianity reigned in the Age of Pisces the fish; this, along with its complementary zodiacal sign, Virgo the virgin, described the exoteric and esoteric aspects of the religion, respectively. Jesus fed the masses with a fish, and the Greek word for fish, , is an acronym for the phrase (“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”). Meanwhile, more mystically inclined Christians observed the cult of the Virgin Mary. In a similar way, Crowley saw himself ringing in the Age of Aquarius, whose complementary zodiacal sign is Leo, the lion. In the zodiac, Aquarius is a man, just as Revelation states 666 is the number of a man. This man, nevertheless, is a Great Beast, just as the esoteric aspect of this man is Leo, the lion, whose astrological ruler is the sun. So strong was this connection that Crowley came to believe that Leo, not Aquarius, dominated the present cosmic cycle.
The prophecy was fulfilled. His mother was right all along. Aleister Crowley was the Great Beast 666.
Day six.
Crowley regretfully left Vancouver and proceeded to San Francisco via Seattle. The last time he had been in California, the earthquake and fire of 1906 had devastated San Francisco. As he toured the city with dissatisfaction, he mused, “The phoenix has perished and from the cinders arose a turkey buzzard.”73 He nevertheless welcomed the opportunity to give an impromptu speech on the Law of Thelema. Then, traveling south, Crowley looked up Katherine Tingley (1847–1929), former head of the TS in America, in Point Loma; although he proposed an alliance between her society and his organizations, she refused to see him. Thence he proceeded to the Grand Canyon, which he thought was the best part of the United States. By December, he returned to New York.
Throughout the journey, Jeanne and Crowley met at odd intervals. He was madly in love with her, and wrote a series of poems, The Golden Rose, about his passion.74 One of these, “Dawn,” recounts awakening with her one morning in Santa Cruz:
Sleep, with a last long kiss,
Smiles tenderly and vanishes.
Mine eyelids open to the gold.
Hilarion’s hair in ripples rolled.
(O gilded morning clouds of Greece!)
Like the sun’s self amid the fleece,
Her face glows. All the dreams of youth,
Lighted by love and thrilled by truth,
Flicker upon the calm wide brow,
Now playmates of the eyelids, now
Dancing coquettes the mouth that move
In all overtures to love.
The Atlantic twinkles in the sun—
Awake, awake, Hilarion!
Jeanne, however, was torn between her love for this strange wanderer and her commitment to her husband. Somewhere after Los Angeles, she broke down. Unable to bear the strain of sneaking about and getting away from her husband, Jeanne left Crowley and returned home.
Back in New York, Crowley took up a new residence at 25 West 44th Street in the name of Cyril Grey. (Crowley used this name for himself in the novel Moonchild, which was still being worked on at this time.) He resumed his acquaintance with John Quinn, found more of his work in Vanity Fair, and on New Year’s Eve wrote his first official proclamation of the Law of Thelema as a Magus: “The Message of the Master Therion.”75
As far as his feline lover, Jeanne, went, Crowley did his best to get her back. Nevertheless, she refused his advances. Her deceitful mask of innocence outraged him: she who had left her husband and slept with another man who filled her with ecstasy now hid behind propriety when Crowley, the other man, knew it was a lie. He noted that he had been “enlightened as to the falseness of the Cat; it therefore became my duty to slay her.”76
On day seven, Matlock Foster began to receive letters that claimed his wife was living with a wealthy lawyer and was planning to poison him. Although unsigned, the letters were undoubtedly Crowley’s. Now that his true colors were showing, Jeanne was grateful that she escaped his clutches unharmed. “He’s probably a cocaine fiend,” she told herself. “Thank God I never sent him anything with my name on it.” A visit by a shivering and weeping woman, claiming “I have a message for you,” puzzled Jeanne until she heard its content: Crowley warned that if she did not return and help him with the Great Work, she would be destroyed. Although he most likely meant that the Secret Chiefs would drive her to the same sort of infamy that they had with Rose, Jeanne took it as a threat. Stiffening, she told the messenger, “You and Mr. Crowley can both go to the devil.”
When Crowley finally accepted that Hilarion would not return to him, he decided to magically sever his ties with her, as he had done with Neuburg before leaving for Amer
ica. Thus, he waited outside her Manhattan office until she appeared on the street at closing time. He confronted her, drawing from his coat his dagger, yellow and inscribed with Hebrew names and sigils. She gasped, thinking he was about to kill her. As he conducted the banishing ritual, a crowd gathered to watch. In the confusion, Jeanne vanished into the mob, believing she had escaped a clumsy murder attempt. The incident disturbed her, and she believed that Crowley astrally visited her one night in her bedroom until she banished him.77 Their encounter on the street, however, satisfied AC: The ritual was complete, and she was gone from his life. Along with Crowley’s The Golden Rose, only Jeanne’s poems “Wife to a Husband” and “The Answer” remained to commemorate their relationship and its passing.
When Leila returned to New York that February 1916, Crowley, impoverished in money and affection, sought consolation in her arms, only to realize how far apart they’d grown. They no longer had anything in common, and she could console him no more than Elaine Simpson had after his break with “Alice.” Like the Cat, Laylah was history. All that remained of her was a poem commemorating their seven years:
Seven times has Saturn swung his scythe;
Seven sheaves stand in the field of Time.
And every sheaf’s as bright and blithe
As the sharp shifts of our sublime
Father the Sun. I leap so lithe
For love to-day,
My love. I may
Not tell the tithe …
We know to-day what once we guessed,
our love no dream of idle youth;
A world-egg, with the stars for nest.
Is this arch-testament of truth.
Laylah, beloved, to my breast!
Our period
Is fixed in God—
Eternal rest.78
Waddell would remain in the United States for several more years, taking violin work as opportunity presented and writing occasional short stories and music articles for the Los Angeles press. These latter activities would lead to her contributing the article “Two Anzacs Meet in London”—recounting her acquaintance with Katherine Mansfield—to New York’s Shadowland magazine in 1923.79 She would continue to travel between Sydney, America, and England through 1926.80 Ultimately, news of her father’s illness would cause her to return to his side in suburban Sydney,81 where she’d teach at Convent of the Sacred Heart in Elizabeth Bay82 and make concert appearances with the Conservatorium Orchestra under Dr. William Arundel Orchard (1867–1961) and the Royal Philharmonic Society of Sydney under Gerald Peachell,83 who served as director from 1928 to 1931.84 On September 14, 1932, at age fifty-one, Leila Waddell would die of uterine cancer.85
For Crowley, day seven was a time of emotional desolation.86
Day eight.
Deja vu swept over Crowley that April as once again he considered which of two women would be his next scarlet concubine. On the one hand, there was Alice Ethel Coomaraswamy, née Richardson (1885–1958), the second wife of art critic and historian Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), who was the cousin of Ponnambalam Rámanáthan. She was a Yorkshire musician who, under the stage name of Ratan Devi (“jewelled goddess”), donned traditional garb and sang Indian melodies while accompanying herself on the tamboura. Crowley considered her a great artist, but likened her “insensate passion, volubility, and vanity”87 to that of a monkey. Alternately, there was Gerda Maria von Kothek, “a girl with a fancy for weird adventures,”88 whom Crowley described in some places as a prostitute and elsewhere as “that brilliant young ‘Angel of the Revolution.’ ”89 While coarse and base, she was also pleasant, sensible, and unaffected: a pleasant break from Alice. Like his other lovers at this time, he theriomorphically compared her to an owl. This tendency to compare lovers to animals was not derogatory. Traditionally, animals, familiars, and spirit guides assisted great initiations, and Crowley viewed his American period as his initiation into the grade of Magus. Thus his lovers became officers of his initiation, taking on the attributes of some sacred beast and helping him learn important magical lessons.
The Owl offered all the delights of carefree ease and placid pleasure; but there was nothing to be gained. The Monkey represented a life of turmoil and anxiety, with few magnificent moments amid the hours of fretfulness; but progress was possible. It was as if the Secret Chiefs had asked me, ‘Are you content to enjoy the fruit of your attainment and live at peace with the world, surrounded by affectation, respect and comfort, or will you devote yourself to mastering and fertilizing mankind, despite the prospect of continual disquietude and almost certain disappointment?’ I chose the Monkey.90
While in her twenties, Alice had moved to India, taken up study of its modern and ancient languages, and found an instructor in its music.91 In the summer of 1911 she was living in a houseboat in Srinagar with Ananda Coomaraswamy; her pregnancy and confrontation with Coomaraswamy’s wife caused the breakup of his first marriage and the beginning of his second. According to Crowley, she was all the while having an affair with Coomaraswamy’s best friend. By 1912, after the birth of her son, Narada, her performances in England became quite popular; she had what might be called perfect pitch, the ability to distinguish—and reproduce—the microtonal notes that characterize Indian music. W. B. Yeats wrote, “Mrs. Coomaraswamy’s singing delighted me. It was as though a moment of life had caught fire, an emotion had come to a sudden casual perfection.”92 George Bernard Saw also praised her work. In 1913 she published the book Thirty Songs from the Pentop and Cashmere.93 By 1916 the Coomaraswamys had come to New York with their two children (a daughter, Rhino, had been born in 1914) for Ratan Devi’s U.S. concert debut. In advance of her debut, she was interviewed in the New York Times, where she lamented, “It seems to be that intensity is the chief thing which distinguishes the poetry of the East from the poetry of the West. I find very seldom in English poetry the poignancy that is common in Oriental poetry.”94 Coomaraswamy called on Crowley to help with his wife’s publicity; AC responded by providing introductions and writing about her in Vanity Fair under the guise of “the celebrated Recut singer, Sri Paramananda Tat.”95 By mid-April, the Beast became another in her supposed string of lovers.
Alice Ethel Coomaraswamy, née Richardson (1885–1958), a.k.a. Ratan Devi. (photo credit 12.6)
It was also in mid April—the 13th—that Ratan Devi debuted at the Princess Theater on 39th Street off of 6th Avenue in Manhattan.96 A reporter for Outlook described the performance:
the audience, which filled all the seats, saw on the stage in the foreground two vases of red flowers, and between them, lying on the floor, a long-necked stringed instrument. The background consisted simply of dark curtains. In a moment the curtains parted and a woman stepped out. She wore Oriental garments, of warm and harmonious colors. Seating herself on the floor, she raised the instrument and held it vertically before her.
Then began a recital of music such as most of the audience had never heard before.… The ragas that Ratan Devi sang sounded very strange, of course, to Western hearers; but, strange as they were, they were most enticing in their beauty.97
She quickly became a sensation in New York.
Crowley’s affair with Ratan Devi was a bizarre romp in which he was as much a pawn as an instigator. As Crowley tells it, Ananda Coomaraswamy, dubious about her musical career and appalled by New York’s high cost of living, was relieved that someone took on the financial burden of caring for her. “All he asked,” Crowley says, “was that I should introduce him to a girl who would be his mistress while costing him nothing.”98 Crowley obliged, introducing Coomaraswamy to the Owl; soon, the two began living together. “The cost of a double room being slightly less than that of two singles,” Crowley described Coomaraswamy’s frugal ways, “he effected a prudent economy by putting this girl in the same bed with his wife when he was out of town.”99
Just as expenses drove Coomaraswamy to accept this arrangement, Crowley suggests, Ratan Devi’s success brought him back. By the time he demanded her
return, however, she was pregnant by Crowley. The encounter turned into a screaming match between husband and wife while Crowley, to their annoyance, watched with placid indifference, refusing to participate in this distasteful game. “You are welcome to stay,” he told her, “but the door is also open.”
His position clear, Crowley left on business for Washington, D.C. It was perhaps the Washington Post’s four-column story on Crowley100 that first brought him to the attention of eccentric and colorful “Stuart X” (Henry Clifford Stuart, 1865–1952) whose letters Crowley was hired to edit and introduce for the book A Prophet in His Own Country. As Crowley described Stuart:
Imagine to yourself a big man, a really big man, six foot three in height, broad and well-proportioned. The entire impression is bigness. And, as should always be the case with homo sapiens, the most important part of the impression is given by the head. Such a brow is only seen in the world’s greatest thinkers.… When he speaks he is transfigured before you. The placid power of the man gives place to elemental energy.101
Born in New York in 1865, he was ten years Crowley’s senior. He began working for his father at age fourteen, and by twenty-one had become freight traffic manager for Central America’s most important railroad. From there, he went on to sundry other jobs, including in real estate, as a mining engineer, and as U.S. Consul-General to Guatemala City.102 He spent fifteen years in Spanish America building railroads,103 and Crowley identified him as the land commissioner of the Panama Railroad.104 A successful businessman, he was “one of the big boomers in Guatemala industries” and had financial investments in New Orleans.105 He married Grace Ingersoll Patchin in New York on December 11, 1894,106 and eventually settled in Washington, D.C., where in 1915 he was voted a member of the Washington Board of Trade.107
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