The child of thy bowels, he shall behold them.
Expect him not from the East, nor from the West; for from no expected house cometh that child.144
Crowley always expected a biological child, and OIVVIO came from no expected place. AC was overjoyed to have not only a son, but his first successor since the days of Jones, Fuller, and Neuburg.
With the Toad Officer goading him to write, Crowley took inspiration from his leisure reading at the cottage. These included Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion (1913) with its long preface on Christianity; anthropologist Sir James G. Frazer’s (1854–1941) classic and elephantine tome on ancient myth and magic, The Golden Bough (1890, 1900, 1911–1915); and psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung’s (1875–1961) Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido (1916), whose chief argument, Crowley thought, was that sex is an outgrowth of the Will, not the converse, as Freud argued.
Shaw was his first catalyst. Plymouth upbringing left Crowley well versed with the Bible, and reading Shaw’s disquisition on Jesus, he concluded the playwright knew neither the Bible, the East, nor mysticism. So he critiqued it in The Gospel According to St. Bernard Shaw, which weighed in at roughly 55,000 words. He claimed that it “establishes the outline of an entirely final theory on the construction of Christianity.”145 Introducing his edition of the book, Francis King called it
a treasury of Crowley’s wit, wisdom and criticism which, even if it was the only book its author had written, would suffice to rebut the slander that Crowley was a pleasure-seeking fraud whose occultism was no more than “making a religion out of his weakness.”146
After finishing this work, Crowley penned a set of eight short stories based on The Golden Bough. The first, written on August 30, was “The Priest of Nemi” (eventually retitled “The King of the Wood”), which took its title directly from Frazer. In the two weeks that followed, he finished “The Mass of Saint-Sécaire,” “The Burning of Melcarth,” “The Oracle of the Corycian Cave,” “The Stone of Cybele,” “The God of Ibreez,” “The Old Man of the Peepul-Tree,” and “The Hearth.”147
Finally, Jung’s book inspired Crowley’s synopsis, “An Improvement on Psycho-analysis: The Psychology of the Unconscious—for Dinner-Table Consumption,” which would appear in Vanity Fair. 148
Meanwhile, his Thelemic pamphlet “The Law of Liberty” was out in England, with another 250 copies for Australian distribution by Frank Bennett.
Despite this prodigious output, Crowley nevertheless found time for his sex magick research, commencing on the fall equinox with Gerda von Kothek, the Owl. This working resulted in Gerda having a vision wherein “Monks in brown robes and hoods go up a green hill, with misty top, in an endless line. They wear rings with red cross within a gold triangle.”149 These visions continued for four days, and inspired Crowley to paint “Four Red Monks Carrying a Black Goat across the Snows to Nowhere.” It marked an early stage of his foray into art.
On day eleven, Crowley wrapped up business at Lake Pasquaney and departed for New Orleans. He arrived on December 9, 1916, still despairing over the state of his life and determined to continue his Great Magical Retirement. Promptly on arrival, his depression lifted in his experience of the Beatific Vision. Harmony and calm overwhelmed him, healing his spiritual woes. Finally convinced the gods were with him, Crowley decided to test them. After a decade of struggle and poverty, he tired of it. The Logos, the prophet of the New Aeon, was going on strike until he received better pay and benefits:
I therefore down tools until I have (1) a competent stenographer (2) money enough in hand to see me comfortable through until the Equinox of Spring.… (3) a guarantee—by some signal, sign or in some more practical manner—that all will be well in the future.… (4) means of publishing immediately all MSS except those destined for Equinox Volume III.150
He would do nothing. And if he starved, then the gods could damn well pull his fat out of the fire.
The strike continued for two weeks before Crowley realized matters had not improved. Finally succumbing to pressure, he noted in his diary:
27 December. I am now going to start work again, with absolutely no resources. I have not even proper paper or money to buy it. Total cash in hand, 70 cents.
Day twelve.
Simon Iff was a mathematician, chess master, Freemason, and mystic. He solved crimes using the principles of psychology and the Law of Thelema. As Crowley described him,
He had a habit of disappearing for long periods, and it was rumoured that he had the secret of the Elixir of Life. For although he was known to be over eighty years of age, his brightness and activity would have done credit to a man of forty; and the vitality of his whole being, the fire of his eyes, the quick conciseness of his mind, bore witness to an interior energy almost more than human.
He was a small man, dressed carelessly in a blue serge suit with a narrow dark red tie. His iron-grey hair was curly and irrepressible; his complexion, although wrinkled, was clear and healthy; his small mouth was a moving wreath of smiles; and his whole being radiated an intense and contagious happiness.151
Crowley’s newest literary creation, Simon Iff was his idealized self-portrait. The gods willing, Iff would also pull him out of the economic pit into which he had fallen. This foray into the popular genre of crime fiction nevertheless permitted him to advertise Thelema. The key was to make the stories accessible—a task at which Crowley had failed with his books of poetry and magick.
Remarkably, he successfully produced well-written and entertaining popular fiction; in short order, he wrote six Simon Iff short stories: “Big Game,” “The Artistic Temperament,” “Outside the Bank’s Routine,” “The Conduct of John Briggs,” “Not Good Enough,” and “Ineligible.” These, like his Frazer-inspired pieces, appeared in The International.152 Crowley went on to write another eighteen Simon Iff short stories based on his experiences in America, but these were never published in his lifetime.
He based the story “Not Good Enough” on his relationship with Ratan Devi, who, even as he wrote it, was still begging Crowley to visit her for Christmas and take her back. By this time, Crowley blamed Ananda Coomaraswamy for sending Ratan Devi on the boat trip that killed their child; in his diary, AC would remember him as a “bastard, thief, coward and murderer.”153 Thus, he modeled his story’s villain, Haranzada (Hindi for “bastard”), after Coomaraswamy, who was reportedly shocked to read it.
Finishing the short stories, Crowley wrote his novel The Butterfly Net. 154 Although Simon Iff figured into this one as well, the main character of the story was Lisa Guiffria (based on Mary Desti), who became involved in the creation of a homunculus. This difficult and convoluted story remains of interest largely because it lampoons his notable acquaintances, including A. E. Waite, Gwen Otter, Annie Besant, Everard Feilding, W. B. Yeats and Isadora Duncan. While staying at Adams Cottage, Crowley had entertained himself by dealing and playing through several hands of card games like skat, piquet, and bridge. In the process, he developed a variation on auction bridge that was such an improvement that he convinced Frank Crowninshield to share it with the readers of Vanity Fair. Crowley’s innovation was this: rather than partners being preselected, players paired up after the cards are dealt using a bidding process. Thus players with a strong combined hand could team up. Crowninshield dubbed the game “pirate bridge” and convened private play-testing sessions to flesh out the rules and strategies.155
Crowley was delighted when they enlisted the help of New York surveyor and noted card-game authority Richard Frederick Foster (1853–1945), “a man who, twenty years before, had been the inaccessible godhead of the universe of card games to my undergraduate enthusiasm!”156 He began writing in 1890 with a manual on whist and over his career penned some sixty-eight books on card games, including the encyclopedic tour de force Foster’s Hoyle.157 Initial play-testing took place on November 3, 1916, at New York’s Knickerbocker Whist Club, with Crowley and Crowninshield observing. Over the following
weeks, it was tried in various settings and, according to Foster, “everywhere met with an enthusiastic reception.”158 Foster believed that pirate bridge would supplant auction bridge to become America’s favorite card game, and at the end of December 1916 issued a press release that was picked up by papers from Boston to Chicago to Kansas City.159 He prepared a thirty-six-page booklet on The Official Laws of Pirate Bridge, which sold for twenty-five cents, to promote the game.160 He also wrote a series of seven articles on the game that ran in Vanity Fair from January through July 1917,161 another fifteen weekly articles for the Philadelphia Inquirer that ran from January through April,162 and very quickly prepared Foster’s Pirate Bridge, which appeared in February 1917.163
Not everyone shared Foster’s high hopes for pirate bridge. American bridge authority Milton Cooper Work (1864–1934) complained, “Its play compared with auction in two-thirds of the hands is a joke. Whenever the partners sit next to each other all finessing and much of the beauty of the play is lost.”164 Nevertheless, the game became trendy in the last years of the 1910s. According to the Lincoln Sunday Star, “people in the east are quite mad about the new game of bridge and … pirate bridge parties are the dernier cries.”165 Indeed, excitement spread, and pirate bridge games, clubs, and demonstrations soon popped up across the United States.166 Pirate bridge products appeared to meet the demand, and soon the trend even hit London and Paris: Foster’s Pirate Bridge was released in London, and the free “War Issue” of Brain Power, distributed to 100,000 readers, included an article on the game.167 French-language books on the game also appeared at this time.168
Although he says that Foster misunderstood one of the rules—thus spoiling the game—Crowley nevertheless enjoyed his newfound celebrity. He was featured as the creator of pirate bridge in an illustrated article for The Washington Post, with his “Appeal to the American Republic” excerpted as an example of his poetic work.169 As Crowley recalled this period, “I had only to wander into the appropriate circles to make myself the darling of the community.”170
As with all pop culture trends, this one soon faded. Contract bridge came along in the 1920s and became the next big thing in the bridge world; it has since become virtually synonymous with the term bridge.
On January 22, 1917, Reuss released a revised OTO constitution and a manifesto for an Anational Grand Lodge, whose headquarters was at Monte Verità, a utopian commune located near Ascona, Switzerland. He planned an Anational Congress on August 15–25, its announcement proclaiming, “There are two centres of the OTO, both in neutral countries, where enquiries can be lodged by those interested in the aim of this congress. One is at New York (U.S. of America), the other at Ascona (Italian Switzerland).” During the congress, readings were conducted of Crowley’s poetry and of the Gnostic Mass. On August 18 and 19 there was also a twelve-hour open-air performance of a Sonnenfest—a Sun Festival or “choral play”—by modern dance pioneers and IX° members Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) and Mary Wigman (1886–1973), along with their female troupe. According to Wigman biographer Mary Anne Santos Newhall, “Under Reuss’s influence, Laban founded his own women’s lodge and inducted his dancers, creating some local outrage and escalating speculation about the ‘sexual magic’ practiced by the Order.”171
Back home, MMM experienced its share of growing pains: financially, things were tight. With creditors presenting bills and threatening legal action, the MMM lodge at 33 Avenue Studios was shut down and moved to 93 Regent Street, and much of its contents warehoused. Some items were even pawned to pay bills.
Destitute, Crowley left New Orleans to stay with his cousin, Lawrence Bishop (1872–1961), and his wife, Birdie. A father of three, Bishop was born in Kentucky and had been a merchant and farmer, but in the 1910s he became a citrus grower in Titusville, Florida.172 When Bishop came to Streatham around 1894, Crowley’s family had put him up; they reciprocated when Emily Crowley visited them in Kentucky in 1904.173 AC now counted on similar hospitality. It was hardly an imposition, as Bishop had plenty of money in the bank, and his orange and grapefruit plantation was so large that his nearest neighbor was ten miles away. On February 9, 1917, Crowley arrived.
Although the Bishops did their best to accommodate Crowley, the fundamentalist beliefs of his cousin, now fiftyish, sickened AC so that he recalled him as “spiritually stunted and corrupted in every way by savage superstition”; for instance, he believed God sank the Titanic as punishment for its builders’ pride. His wife, Alma, was no better. Although under thirty, she appeared a “wrinkled hag of sixty, with no idea of life beyond the gnawing fear of the hereafter.”174 A tyrannical mother, her children constantly cried, “I don’t want to grow up to be like Mother!” Although she and Crowley did not get along, she inspired the Simon Iff story “Suffer the Children,” which Crowley considered one of his best.
Despite these public sentiments from his Confessions some thirteen years after the fact, at the time Crowley offered a grateful gesture, certainly anonymously. On March 6, 1917, his diary records:
Threatened severe frost. I averted same, to repay my cousin for his hospitality. The Op[us] was very remarkable. I went out at noon, in bitter cold and high wind; and I willed. I then slept very deeply for three hours, and woke in still, warm weather, with the sun shining. The forecasts had given several days of cold; and forecasts in America are very different to those in England; the rarely go wrong.
Crowley’s misguided confidence in American meteorology notwithstanding, he believed he saved his cousin’s orchards.
Still miserable, Crowley concluded that the Secret Chiefs were punishing him for being so cocksure as to go on strike. When he left Titusville that spring, Crowley sang softly to himself,
What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft o’er Titusville,
Though every prospect pleases,
The people make me ill.175
Day thirteen.
Although Crowley left the South far behind when he returned to New York, poverty followed him. “I really don’t quite remember what I did about eating,” he recalled.176 His friend and pupil, Leon Engers Kennedy (1891–1970),177 let Crowley sleep on the sofa in his Manhattan studio for “quite a long time.”178 He first entered Crowley’s circle when he joined the AA on September 23, 1912; and when John Yarker died in 1913, it was he, as newly appointed Patriarch Grand Secretary General of the Sovereign Sanctuary of the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Masonry in and for Great Britain and Ireland, who announced Henry Meyer’s election to the membership.179 In the last Equinox, Crowley dedicated the poem “The Disciples” to him.180
Leon Engers (he later dropped his last name altogether) was born in Antwerp, Belgium, on February 22, 1891, but he described himself as a Dutch citizen.181 This may be explained by Crowley’s comments that Engers was “the adopted son of a multi-millionaire” and “was in receipt of an ample allowance from his family.”182 Studying art at the Sorbonne and Académie Julian in Paris, Engers’s drive to paint something deeper than the physical appearance of his subjects eventually led him to occultism. The result was the “psychochrome,” or painting of his sitter’s aura.183
In exchange for the hospitality, Crowley encouraged Engers’s artistic endeavors by arranging a November, 1917, exhibition of his art and reviewing it in The International, where he enthused: “These pictures must be seen to be appreciated at their full value. But it is certainly possible to predict a great vogue for these portraits. Everyone must naturally wish a representation in permanent form of their inner as well as their outer body.”184 In an unpublished essay, Crowley similarly praised his paintings,
Psychochromes represent a duplex advance: one column attacking aesthetic, the other vision. Mr. Engers Kennedy has happily combined the forms of penetration into soul, and character with the art, of decoratrice and in his psychochromes he expresses in some cases the individuality of the sitter, in others a temporary mind in such a way that truth varies with beauty.185
Soul-painter Leon Engers Kennedy (1
891–1970). (photo credit 12.8)
One of his portraits of Crowley. (photo credit 12.9)
In January 1919 the Atlanta Constitution ran a full-page story on Engers and his “soul-paintings”; a month later he exhibited his psychochromes at the Paint Box Galleries in Washington Square South.186 Engers would go on to study art under Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) at the Bauhaus.187 When he married Catherine Elizabeth Reilly of New York,188 Crowley lamented:
I failed, however, to keep him out of the clutches of a very beautiful redheaded Irish typist, hysterical from sexual suppression. She finally persuaded him to marry her, and I am afraid his last chance of a career is among the dusty documents in the files of the marriage bureau at City Hall. At least, I have heard no more of him since his return to Holland.189
Despite this direful judgement, Engers went on not only to teach painting and drawing at Bradley University’s School of Art from 1949 to 1958 but also to serve as its director.190 Even late in life, he held several exhibitions, including at Bradley’s Gallery 20 in 1964 and New York’s Fulton Gallery in 1965.191 These exhibits included, among his portraits and studies in light, paintings from his Transcendental Series. As he then explained them, “Here I attempt to depict, to give form to a subjective, spiritual experience, one relating to the destiny of man in his cosmic evolution.” His definition of an artist, although not original, nevertheless resonates with Thelemic philosophy: “The true artist must paint. He finds his painting an inescapable necessity—he has an inner drive that demands that his ideas, philosophies, feelings, and his soul be put on canvas. This is the distinction between a master and a talented amateur.”192
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