Stuart was an avid letter-writer, sending his quirky, almost free verse, observations about life and politics to hundreds of newspapers and other correspondents across the country. One recipient, the White House, responded to the first few letters, but the vast majority he sent thereafter went unanswered; the Secret Service, investigating, found him “harmless and ‘light.’ ”108 Another recipient was John R. Rathon, editor of the Providence Journal, who forwarded the letter to the Bureau of Investigation suggesting, “You might give this lunatic the once over.”109 Crowley collected, edited, and commented on 191 of these letters, which appeared as A Prophet in His Own Country that summer. Ever the entrepreneur, AC even tried selling a copy to Theodore Roosevelt.110 He also pitched a new edition—equally unsuccessfully—to Henry Holt & Co.: “Its complete originality, both of thought and of style, marks this book as unique. Nothing, since Nietzsche in Germany and Carlyle in England, is at all comparable to it.”111 The book’s marketing, however, hit a snag when advertisements instructed that orders be sent to the Fifth Avenue Bank, Crowley’s bank in New York; the volume of mail became so bothersome that they forced Crowley to close his account with them.112 To promote the book, Stuart was also wont to leave copies in various hotels during his travels.113
Stuart X: Henry Clifford Stuart (1865–1952). (photo credit 12.7)
Despite the book being by Stuart, its editor also received attention in press reviews. The New Age quipped, “To be introduced and annotated by Mr. Aleister Crowley is a distinction that most prophets have been unable to obtain.… Either prophets are rare in America, or they avoid introductions by, perhaps even to, Mr. Crowley.”114 Meanwhile, the Indianapolis Sunday Star, observed, “With Mr. Crowley’s tremendous introduction in mind (nobody introduces Crowley) the reader will no doubt approach the lucubrations of Mr. Stuart with keen expectation.”115
The August 1916 Vanity Fair featured an article about Stuart. Although unsigned, it is doubtlessly by Crowley, who damns the book and author with faint praise: “His point of view may be rudely described as that of an inspired baby,” his writing style “destroys the peace of mind of editors,” and “it will not be his fault if he does not sell at least one copy.”116 Two months later, Crowley published a letter in the Washington Post insisting that the European press had mistakenly claimed that he and Stuart X were the same person, and that Crowley had only written the “imbecile introduction”;117 since the Washington Post is not a European newspaper, the letter appears to be a publicity stunt. Stuart eventually relocated to Northern California, and after his wife died in 1929,118 he legally changed his name to Stuart X,119 giving himself (arguably) the world’s shortest last name. He died on May 21, 1952, in Alameda California.120 While preparing A Prophet in His Own Country for press that spring, Crowley encountered a curious array of distractions in Washington, D.C. One of these involved a missing jade statue of Kuan-yin, a title of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhissattva of compassion in Buddhism. On May 28, 1916, the following ad ran in the Chicago Daily Tribune and papers in fifty other cities from Washington to St. Louis:
JADE KWANNON—STOLEN—$10,000 WILL be paid for information leading to the recovery intact of the jade kwannon stolen from Dr. S. Y. S. on Aug. 29, 1914. Stuart X., 2619 Woodley-pl., Washington, D.C.121
“Dr. S. Y. S.” is Sun Yat Sen (1866–1925), the Chinese revolutionary and father of modern China, who served in 1912 as the first provisional president of the newly formed Republic of China. The ad sparked interest in the press, causing Stuart to say “This is a very delicate matter. I prefer to think over it until tomorrow morning, and if you will telephone me then I may be able to say something about it.”122 Upon the statue’s recovery a few days later, Crowley, on Stuart’s behalf, announced to the press that its recovery “will, through its powerful influence over the minds of superstitious Chinese, mean a return to power of Dr. Sun Yat Sen.”123 At this same time, an article appeared in The Washington Post on “The Oriental Mind”; an elaboration of the previous statement attributed to Crowley, the article, although unsigned, is likely by AC: “Once more in hand, a wonderful influence is promised over the minds of the superstitious Chinese, with the by no means remote possibility that through its beneficent presence Sun Yat Sen will again be placed in the full tide of prosperity as regards himself and the future of his beloved nation.”124
Other less prominent activities also landed Crowley in the D.C. press. He gave a lengthy interview for the April 30 Washington Post about good and evil spirits and nature of possession, after poisoner Dr. Arthur Warren Waite claimed in his defense that he was possessed by an evil spirit called the “Man from Egypt” who drove him to murder his in-laws.125 In a May 12 letter to the Washington Post, Crowley—recalling his Statue of Liberty stunt—nominated Ireland as arbiters of universal peace.126 On Friday, May 26, Crowley played four games of chess at the National Press Club against twenty-five-year-old chess champion Norman Tweed Whittaker (1890–1975); despite excellent playing on both sides, Whittaker won all four games.127 Later that summer, he posed as a physician to condemn the cruel way in which anesthesia was administered, because psychological stress was the cause of nine out of ten deaths in surgery; Crowley advocated allowing patients to self-medicate, to slowly savor the ether intoxication so that when the surgeon arrives, the patient goes under easily and willingly:
The nurse should be instructed to lead the thoughts of the patient into pleasant channels; she should describe as vividly as she can the glories and joys of ether.… The surgeon should arrive at from 2 to 3 hours after the beginning. If things have been done properly, the patient should feel just about as much interest in his arrival as the theatergoer does when the curtain rises.128
Crowley advocated this medical practice in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, signing himself “Aleister Crowley, St. George’s Hospital, London.”
While he was away, Alice and Ananda Coomaraswamy resolved their dilemma. Although Alice loved Crowley and wanted to be with him, her husband convinced her to return with him to England for her confinement. Crowley, with a detached “Do what thou wilt,” offered no resistance with her choice. By the end of May she was on a boat for England. Even though she was heading east, for Crowley she was sailing off into the sunset.
On the morning of day nine, Crowley left the consoling arms of the Owl and his forthcoming work in Vanity Fair and Viereck’s other magazine, the general interest The International, for a Great Magical Retirement. Although he had formally accepted the grade of Magus in October, Crowley felt, in June of 1916, his understanding to be imperfect, his initiation incomplete, and his providence uncertain. In short, he was stuck in a magical rut.
Crowley took a meditative vacation at Adams Cottage, located on Lake Pasquaney near Bristol, Hebron, and Alexandria, New Hampshire. Known today as Newfound Lake, Pasquaney was seven miles long and two and a half miles wide, the third-largest lake in the state and perhaps its most beautiful.
Lake Pasquaney lies among the mountains of New Hampshire. It is about 17 miles in circumference. Bristol, the nearest railway station, a town of 1200 inhabitants, is some three miles from the lower end. The lake contains several islands, and its shores are dotted with summer villas, mostly of the log hut type, though here and there is a more pretentious structure, or a cluster of boarding-houses. Bristol is about three hours from Boston, so the Lake is a favorite summer resort, even for week-enders. The scenery is said by Europeans who know both to compare with Scotland or Switzerland without too serious disadvantage.129
Adams Cottage was wooden with a brick fireplace and chimney. Its main room faced Newfound Lake with the bedroom and kitchen behind the fireplace.
Owned by astrologer Evangeline Smith Adams (1868–1932), it was “not her principal cottage which she called the Zodiac, but a sort of spare cottage.”130 He had met Adams in 1915 and agreed to coauthor a book on astrology. The pairing seemed ideal, as a few months earlier he had complained, “I do not think there is any book on Astrology of any value w
hatever.”131 Collaboration was not in the stars, however, and the authors ultimately split, Crowley believing Adams tried to cheat him. In the November 1918 International, Crowley, writing as Cor Scorpionis, published “How Horoscopes Are Faked,” a scathing critique of Adams and her methods.
She is grotesquely ignorant of the first principles of astronomy. She has no conception, for example, of the Solar System as a Disk, but imagines that the planets are all over the place, like the raisins in a plum pudding. She calls her country house the Zodiac—and doesn’t know what the Zodiac is!132
In the end, Crowley’s manuscript would be published fourteen years later in Adams’s name.133
In his first days there, he wrote the essay “De Thaumaturgia.”134 The following day, Independence Day, he mused about his adventures in America and the attainment to the grade of Magus (9°=2°). This was the first time that he recognized the seventy-three-day cycles that characterized his initiatory journey toward becoming a Magus. Crowley speculated that thirty-one of these “Chokmah days” would encompass his initiation, since thirty-one was the number of AL, the formal title of The Book of the Law, whose message it was his job as Magus to promulgate. His first three Chokmah days in America—through June 9, 1915—were miserable, lonely, stagnant times. These ended on the dawn of the fourth day, when, like clockwork, he met Jeanne Robert Foster. On the fifth day, he formally accepted the grade of Magus. Crowley and Foster parted by the sixth day, while Ratan Devi appeared and vanished on the eighth. Now, on the ninth Chokmah day, he pondered the meaning of his ordeal.
Despite the illumination, Crowley remained uninspired. His diary records his frustration with this creative and spiritual block:
I am tempted for example to crucify a toad or copulate with a duck or sheep or goat or set a house on fire or murder some one with the idea—a perfectly good magical idea, of course—that some supreme violation of all the laws of my being would break my Karma or dissolve the spell which seems to bind me.135
Horrible as it may strike some, the idea was one of great antiquity. For instance, the Hindus who participated in the holy tantric ritual of the panchatattva—popularly known as the five elements—would drink wine, eat meat, and have casual sex (regardless of caste or relationship); any one of these was antithetical to the Hindu lifestyle, but in its proper context this ceremonial violation of convention constituted a powerful magical act.
This technique gave Crowley an idea to banish the dying god of the old aeon (Jesus/Osiris/Adonis) and pave the way for the new aeon of Thelema. Early one morning in mid-July he caught a frog and ensconced it in a chest. After presenting it with gold, frankincense, and myrrh, he released it and baptized it with the name Jesus. Throughout the day, Crowley sincerely identified both the frog and himself with the old aeon, worshiping this Jesus and asking it to perform miracles. That night, he again captured the toad, saying to it,
All my life thou hast plagued me and affronted me. In thy name—with all other free souls in Christendom—I have been tortured in my boyhood; all delights have been forbidden unto me; all that I had has been taken from me, and that which is owed to me they pay not—in thy name.
He next condemned and crucified the frog, then ended the magical passion play by blessing it, vowing to assimilate its character, and stabbing it in the side. He ritually ate its legs to incorporate the familiar, and the remains he burned to symbolically consume the old aeon in fire.
“The result was immediately apparent,”136 he noted when a young woman from Bristol asked Crowley for a job as his secretary. He considered it and, believing she bore a striking resemblance to the toad, recognized her as the next animal guide or officer of his initiation. He hadn’t planned on writing, but the gods apparently wished him to; so he hired the Toad and went to work.
On July 12, 1916, at about 4 p.m., a sudden cloudburst dumped torrents of rain and lightning on Lake Pasquaney. Dashing out of his cabin and up to shore, Crowley rescued his canoe from the water, then dashed back indoors. When he stepped inside, rain dripping onto the floor from his soaked clothes, he encountered a drenched man and his equally waterlogged wife and child smiling sheepishly back at him. They too sought shelter from the storm. Crowley smiled in welcome, then excused himself to change into dry clothes.
A weary sigh escaped his lips as he stepped into his bedroom and out of his garments. He was in no mood for uninvited guests. More than withdrawn, Crowley felt downright despondent, wondering if he was deluded to think himself a Magus. What if he had strayed in some way, and the Secret Chiefs had abandoned him just as they’d abandoned Mathers? While he could surely continue to write, what would be the point in living? And how could he be sure he was really any good at it?
As he pulled on a dry shirt, a his thoughts were interrupted by a “tremendous bang, like the bursting of a bomb, not like thunder.”137 A fireball a foot in diameter appeared in the cabin, striking the floor inches from his feet and projecting an electric spark, bright as an arc light, up to his left middle finger. It was gone as suddenly as it came. After the initial shock wore off, he scanned the room and found no sign of damage to the building. Like a true Magister Templi, he pondered the significance of this event. The left middle finger was particularly sacred, and this coupled with the appearance of the Toad Officer and the unusual presence of those taking shelter in his abode constituted a clear omen to Crowley, assuring him that his ongoing initiation was genuine.
He reported the event in a letter to the New York Times,138 generating some interest in the scientific community. One of those interested was Doctor William Sturgis Bigelow (1850–1926), a retired Boston physician who had studied anatomy and pathology in Strasbourg and bacteriology with Louis Pasteur in Paris, then returned as a lecturer to Harvard Medical School. A “gay blade who never married,”139 Sturgis had converted to Buddhism, delivered the Ingersoll Lecture on “Buddhism and Immortality” at Harvard in 1908, and in 1911 gave to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts his collection of 25,000 pieces of Chinese and Japanese art.140 At his request, Crowley provided him a detailed description, with diagrams, of his electrical experience, e.g., “The colour was violet and ultra-violet, like an arc light, but with much crimson in it,” and “It did not oscillate, but remained steady for a period which I dare hardly estimate, and then burst.”141 For two of Crowley’s qeustions, however, Bigelow referred him to Professor Thompson.
Professor Elihu Thomson (1853–1937)—inventor of the dynamo and founder of General Electric—confirmed Crowley’s encounter as that anomaly of electricity, ball lightning. He also entertained Crowley’s theories about the phenomenon.142 Writing privately to Thomson, Bigelow remarked “His letter seems clear, all but the first and last lines, which, with the odd red stamp on the first page, suggest that he may possibly be some kind of a crank.”143
Also convincing AC of the validity of his initiation was a state of consciousness he dubbed the Star-Sponge Vision. It began gradually rather than full-blown, with Crowley losing his sense of all substance in the universe. Aware only of infinite space—the kabbalistic Ain Soph—this void soon filled with countless pinpoints of light. He understood this to represent the basic structure of the universe. Concentrating on the vision, the black void receded into the background while all of space bathed in light, the kabbalistic Ain Soph Aur (limitless light). Despite the field of light against which they shone, all the pinpoints of light remained visibly distinct. Nothingness with twinkles, he thought. But what twinkles! In time, Crowley associated these points with stars, souls, and thoughts. And he saw all the points interconnected through a network of luminescent rays, just as the universe’s contents were all related. He would never again see the world in the same way.
On day ten, Ratan Devi began sending letters to Crowley, begging him to take her back: on the boat to England, she had gotten sick and miscarried. She had reconsidered and wanted to be with him. Crowley minced no words in his reply. She had made her decision, and the only way he would take her back was if she made a clean brea
k with her past and left her husband. Despite daily letters to him, she was unable to take what Crowley considered to be the necessary steps. Unfortunately, in 1917, after Crowley was well out of the picture, her husband left her for Stella Bloch, a seventeen-year-old dancer from one of her rehearsals, thus ending their troubled marriage.
Meanwhile, Crowley was oblivious to the wheels turning in Vancouver. While AC was at Adams Cottage, Frater Achad passed through the Abyss and took the oath of a Magister Templi, filling the grade so his Master could proceed to that of Magus. Unfortunately, Jones soon concluded that he had leapfrogged over Crowley to the ultimate grade of Ipsissimus (1°=10°) at the top of the Tree of Life; but, unable to manage so great an attainment, he plunged down the tree’s central shaft back to its base as a Neophyte (10°=1°). To match the reversal of his grade from 1°=10° to 10°=1°, Jones expanded his new motto from OIV (Omnia in Unum, “All in one”) to OIVVIO (Omnia in Unum, Unus in Omnia).
Hearing the news on August 21, 1916, Crowley was, as might be expected, surprised. The logical holes in Achad’s claim notwithstanding, Crowley considered his star pupil’s attainment to the grade of Magister Templi (the only claim he accepted) to be a remarkable fulfillment of prophecy. Exactly nine months after his rituals to have a child by Jeanne Foster culminated on the September 1915 equinox, Crowley had not a physical child but a metaphysical one: Frater Achad emerged from the Abyss and assumed the mantle of a Magister Templi. He was furthermore the child prophesied in The Book of the Law:
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