Perdurabo

by Richard Kaczynski

  Asking for a message, she heard gurgling water. A dark farmhouse appeared to her, transforming into an equally dark vagina, and then into a group of soldiers with guns surrounding an enthroned king. Roddie Minor asked for a clearer message. In response, she saw a flesh-like egg with intricate convolutions, encircled with clouds, trees, mountains, and water—the four elements. A camel then stepped into the foreground.

  Hearing her mention an egg, Crowley perked up, recalling it was an important image in the Abuldiz Working with Mary Desti. The camel, of course, was Roddie.

  She asked the king’s name, and the word Ham appeared. This Crowley interpreted as Khem, the ancient name of Egypt. When the king stood and walked off, a gray-bearded wizard in a long black gown appeared. Looking back at Roddie, he took the king’s arm and led him into a cave. She followed.

  “Tell them you’re Eve,” Crowley suggested. When she did, everything vanished. Roddie now found the king sitting in a canopy-covered niche in the mountainside. The wizard sat beneath a tree and fanned himself. Crowley urged her again to ask the king’s name. Despite her fear, Roddie asked. The king smiled, and she understood she had to build a fire before he would speak. So the king and the wizard taught her the fire-building ritual. Once lit, she saw a beautiful lion beside the blaze. The wizard, still holding a pair of sticks, smiled at her and said, “child.” A naked boy danced in the woods before them.

  Contented, the wizard sat and extended his hand toward her. Roddie accepted the invitation, sitting at his left hand and watching the dancing boy. Tenderly putting his arm around her, he rested her head on his shoulder and said, “It’s all in the egg.”

  The Beast and the Camel repeated their experiment of January 14 over the next few months, generally on weekends. It became Crowley’s longest, most detailed working. The king, they learned, was Eosophon, and the boy was Augustus Fionchare. The most important actor, however, proved to be the old wizard. “There was what I may call a permanent background to the vision,” Crowley said of the workings,13 adding that the wizard “lived in a place as definite as an address in New York, and in this place were a number of symbolic images representing myself and several other adepts.” His name was Amalantrah, and he proved himself to Crowley by providing the elusive spelling of Baphomet (a thorny problem, since its etymology is unknown and its orthography suspect): As BAFOMETHR, it added up to Amalantrah’s own number, 729, and suggested the meaning “Father Mithras.”

  On January 25, Amalantrah showed the Camel a green multiarmed deity seated by a door bearing the inscription “Gate of Abdullah” in strange characters. Beyond this gate was the Marrakesh oasis of Oseika, where Roddie met the tall Moor Athanan.

  “What is my true number?” the Camel finally asked.

  “103,” Athanan answered.

  “What is my magical name?”

  “In my language, it is Ahitha.” This Crowley quickly tallied to 417. Both 103 and 417 were one digit shy of being magically significant: 104 being the Hebrew letter Tzaddi, the fish hook, while 418 was the number of Abrahadabra, Aiwass, Heru-Ra-Ha, Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, and Nuit’s cry of “To me!”14 The lacking digit, Crowley deduced, symbolized the phallus.

  During the discussion, Crowley began to ask about his plan to solicit support from his friends to unify all occult groups. “Tell me if Annie Besant will live long in her present body?”

  “Yes.”

  Damn. “Is a political campaign among existing occult societies with a view to unification under 666 a good plan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Should I approach Bert Reese?” Reese (1851–1926) was an American spiritualist whom Crowley had met in London before the war. Aged in his sixties, he earned a lucrative income consulting for wealthy businessmen.

  “Yes.”

  “Should I approach another person?” He was thinking of Ada Leverson.

  “No.”

  “Should I approach Gouraud?” This was Aimée Crocker Gouraud (1871–1941), daughter of Pacific Coast millionaire E. B. Crocker, who had helped finance the Union Pacific Railroad. Born in Sacramento, she lived a colorful life wherever she went, whether it was New York, France, England, or India. Author of Moon-Madness and Other Fantasies,15 the Philadelphia Inquirer described the Queen of Bohemia thus: “Call her a millionairess, an aesthete, a genius at bizarre and extravagant entertainment, a citizeness of many lands, a dabbler in art and the occult, a seeker after weird adventure and you have not begun to say it all.”16 Her passport application listed her occupation simply as “capitalist.”17 She had married four times: her first two marriages ended in divorce, she was a widow to her third husband Jackson Gouraud, and in 1914 she married Prince Alexandre Miskinoff of Russia.18 Her interests in mysticism and the occult caused her to embrace many religious traditions. Indeed, Crowley had enrolled her into OTO prior to the war; she was one of the dedicatees of the poem “The Disciples” in the last Equinox.19 Crowley unsuccessfully wooed her (and would continue to do so over the years). As her friend Leah Hirsig recalled,

  He has proposed marriage to her nearly every time he has seen or written her for the last ten years.

  She adores him; she realizes that he is far beyond any of her Russian counts and other suckers that fill her drawing-room; but she fears him. Some fortune teller told her that her fifth marriage—if she contracted a fifth marriage—would be the death of her. 20

  Ironically, Crowley’s main hindrance was that he always presented an air of wealth while she preferred her men penniless.

  “Yes,” he agreed, AC should approach Gouraud.

  “Is there anyone else to approach?”

  “Some woman.” Athanan described an attractive, middle-aged American, stout and large-breasted, with chestnut hair and fair skin. Married but without children, she was educated, worked as a singer or musician, and knew Aimée Gouraud. She lived near 5th Avenue. and her name was Elsie Gray Parker.

  Given enough information to search for this mysterious ally, Crowley asked about practical matters. “When may Therion expect fulfillment of Liber Legis chapter three, verse thirty-one?” This passage read, “There cometh a rich man from the West who shall pour his gold upon thee.”

  “September.”

  “What year?”

  “1918.” Athanan would be wrong on this point.

  “What nationality is the man referred to in that verse?”

  “Austrian.” The rich man Crowley would eventually discover was German. He was not, however, a man of leisure as Athanan described. It was one of several dead ends given by Amalantrah. Although Crowley would search for the mysterious Elsie Gray Parker, he would never find her. And, despite Crowley’s soliciting the help of Bert Reese, a union of magical orders did not occur.

  As the workings progressed, Crowley increasingly incorporated the IX°, anal sex, Anhalonium lewinii, and hashish in order to improve the connection. At this time, Amalantrah assured Crowley that he could transliterate his motto, To Mega Therion, into Hebrew without losing its numerical value. (Try though Crowley might, the wizard’s solution only added up to 740, not 666.)

  That very day, however, one reader of The International responded to Crowley’s essay, “The Revival of Magick,” which had run in the September and October, 1917, issues. The inciteful passage read:

  “Herein is Wisdom; let him that hath understanding count the number of the Beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is 600 & 3 score & 6.” [TO MEGA THERION], the Great Wild Beast, has the value, according to the Greek system, of 666. It is, of course, the title of the Master Therion.

  The letter (dated February 24, 1918) came to Viereck at The International offices, and read,

  Please inform your readers that I, Shmuel bar Aiwaz bie Yackou de Shirabad, have counted the number of a man.

  Tau+ 400 + Resh + 300 + Yod + 10 + Vau + 6 + Nin + 50. Read from right to left.

  A reader had sent in the solution to Amalantrah’s puzzle! Then he noticed the correspondent’s name: Samuel bar Aiwaz. All these years, C
rowley thought the name of his holy guardian angel was artificial; in reality, it was a Hebrew name! Without hesitation, he dashed off a letter to the man, Shmuel bar Aiwaz bie Yackou de Shirabad, who had Anglicized his name to Samuel A. Jacobs (c. 1891–1971). Born in Persia, he came to America as a youth, and in 1909 became a printer for the Persian Courier in New York, then designed and revised unusual typefaces for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. In future years, he would operate the Golden Eagle Press in Mount Vernon, New York, and design books for Covici Friede, New Directions, Oxford University Press, and Dutton; his design for Covici Friede’s 1930 edition of The Canterbury Tales was named one of the “Fifty Books of the Year” by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. However, his claim to fame may well be as designer of poetry books for e. e. cummings (1894–1962).21 When Crowley responded to his letter, he supplied Crowley with the spelling of Aiwaz: OIVZ. This Crowley anxiously tallied to the number ninety-three.

  The coincidence floored him: from a single man he received the Hebrew orthography of Therion plus the traditional and numerically significant spelling of Aiwass as Aiwaz. Significantly, these were solutions that had eluded Crowley, the scribe of The Book of the Law. The importance of this event caused him to write of Samuel A. Jacobs, “He is one of the most important links in the chain of evidence that superhuman intelligences really exist.”22

  Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs (c. 1891–1971). (photo credit 13.2)

  Through February and March, several “sisters of the order” helped with the operations; these individuals Crowley likened to three scorpions of the desert through which the Camel was leading him. The first of these, Eva Tanguay (1878–1947), was the highest-paid vaudeville star of her time (at the time of the 1929 stock-market crash, she lost over $2 million). A “hoydenish, frizzy-haired blonde, celebrated for her animated delivery and her outlandish, often wildly feathered costumes,”23 she had been a performer since childhood, when she toured for five years portraying Cedric Errol in Little Lord Fauntleroy. Her voice was ordinary—Percy Hammond described it as “the wail of the prehistoric diplodocus”24—but her energetic performances more than made up for it, inviting comparison to “a human dynamo.”25 Admittedly egotistical (her songs included “T-A-N-G-U-A-Y” and “The Tanguay Rag”), she nevertheless parodied herself in her hit “Egotistical Eva.” Her trademark song, however, mirrored her lifestyle and earned her the title of the “I Don’t Care” girl.26 And she truly didn’t care what others thought: she sang risqué songs (e.g. “It’s Been Done Before but Never the Way I Do It”) and had very public love affairs (she was linked to African American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson). When Crowley met her she was at the top of her game, having just produced and starred in Energetic Eva (1916) and The Wild Girl (1917).27 AC considered her a supreme artist, writing, “I have no words to hymn her glory, nay, not if I were Shelley and Swinburne and myself in one.”28 His appreciation of her, “Drama be Damned,” appears in the April 1918 International.

  Singer Eva Tanguay (1878–1947). (photo credit 13.3)

  Lecturer Marie Roehling (b. 1891). (photo credit 13.4)

  Second was Marie Lavrov, née Roehling (b. 1891). A Russian immigrant from Odessa, she became a U.S. citizen upon her April 17, 1913, marriage in Chicago to Herman Roehling.29 Although she made her home in Chicago, at the time she met Crowley she was traveling as a lecturer on Russia. On May 23, 1917, she had addressed representatives of 125 women’s organizations at a meeting of the League of Cook Country Clubs in Chicago, speaking on the condition of Russia before and after prohibition, remarking, “The revolution never would have succeeded without prohibition. Our peasants had been encouraged to stupefy themselves with drink. When that was taken away they could think better. The Russians have been forty years starting a real revolution, but when it came it was good.”30 From there, she lectured at Milwaukee-Downer College on Russian women, and on March 10, 1908, the Ethical Culture Society in Philadelphia.31 Standing five feet, six and a half inches tall with gray eyes, dark brown hair, and a fair complexion, her magical name was Olun, after Plato’s Timaeus. Meaning “the whole of wholes” or “Absolute Whole,” Crowley connected it to Nuit, Our Lady of the Stars. Shortly after meeting her, Crowley took her as his new Scarlet Woman, noting that Olun and Marie both added to 156, the number of Babalon. Her name appears throughout Liber Aleph. Although by March 22 Crowley had her and Roddie Minor together in bed with him doing magick to cure Marie’s “sin complex” and Roddie’s jealousy, Olun “soon abandoned the unequal contest.”32 When reprinting his Russian memoir The Fun of the Fair nearly three decades later, Crowley would name her among the dedicatees.

  Completing the triad was Dorothy A. Troxel (1896–1986), a musician who held an associate of music degree from Dana School in her native Warren, Ohio. AC cultivated her as a magical partner at the request of Amalantrah, who dubbed her Wesrun; depending on the spelling, her name was either 333 (dispersion) or 888 (redemption), making Crowley feel obligated to save her. Thirty years later, as a geographic names specialist with the Army Map Service, she would begin the five-year project of compiling the first modern Mongolian-English dictionary.33

  Besides this trinity of scorpions, a fourth woman figured into the Amalantrah Working: Mrs. Elsa Lowensohn Lincke (b. 1864),34 who reputedly introduced the cabaret to America.35 A German musician who had lived in New York since 1904, she was described by Crowley as “antique, but sprightly” and as having “abandoned worldly pleasures for spiritual joys.” She had been interested in H. Spencer Lewis36 and his Rosicrucian group, Ancient and Mystical Order Rosæ Crucis (AMORC), “merrily disdainful of criticism based on his elementary blunders in Latin and his total ignorance of the history of the Order which he claimed to rule. The old lady was simple-minded, sincere and earnest.”37 She helped the order by giving AC money for the Great Work. Amalantrah dubbed her Bazedon, calling her totem a toad and her numeral 444 (significantly, 444 was the number of the frog-headed god of the earth).

  On March 30, 1918, Frater Achad, having sold all his possessions to be by his master’s side, arrived from Vancouver. He assumed the magical name Arcteon, which Amalantrah had given earlier as the name of an unborn prophet of the Law. Besides helping Crowley interrogate the wizard, he also helped prepare the new Equinox, and participated in a series of experiments with ether.

  Disaster struck in April, when Viereck transferred ownership of The International to Dr. Lindley Miller Keasbey (1867–1946), the former chair of the University of Texas Department of Economics and Political Science and an authority on international law. The previous summer, he had been dismissed for his pro-German pacifist activism in forming the People’s Council for Democracy and Terms of Peace and lecturing across the country on its behalf.38 Although Crowley dedicated “Concerning the Law of Thelema”39 to him, Keasbey refused to include his work in future issues. This caused Crowley to accuse Keasbey of mismanagement; any trouble at the paper, however, Viereck attributed to Crowley’s tendency to publish his own writings in favor of contributions by talented new writers.

  The Amalantrah Working nevertheless proceeded, with new assistants arriving in May. Operations continued until June 16, when Crowley, satisfied that he and Roddie had built the Temple of Jupiter, ended the Amalantrah Working.

  That July, another pilgrim sought Crowley in New York. Cecil Frederick Russell (1897–1987) was a “surly, mulish and bitterly rebellious”40 attendant at an Annapolis naval hospital who, having saved his earnings to purchase The Equinox for $100, was memorizing the Holy Books. Russell was born in Greenwood, Massachusetts, on June 9, 1897.41 His family later moved to Orlando, Florida, and two months short of his twentieth birthday, Russell enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Serving from April 22, 1917, to December 12, 1918, Russell began as a Hospital Apprentice stationed at the U.S. Naval Academy Hospital in Annapolis, Maryland, and also aboard the USS Reina Mercedes. By 1918 he had advanced to the office of Pharmacist Mate.42 He wrote Crowley at The International, arranging a visit where he and Crowley ate lunch
and took an astral journey; that evening, Crowley and his local OTO officers initiated him to the III°. His amazing ability and exceptional energy, Crowley thought, were well-suited to the Great Work, and he was likewise anxious to help the cause. Alas, duty called him back to Annapolis for the time being.

  Cecil Frederick Russell (1897–1987). (photo credit 13.5)

  The following month, AC’s relationship with Roddie Minor ended. Although Crowley claimed to treat her as an equal in all respects, she nevertheless felt inferior. He attributed the resulting friction and resentment to the Vision of the Demon Crowley, a phrase he used to describe the phenomenon where every student at one point or another saw him as a horrible monster; those who endured would see beyond the illusion and know him as a great teacher, while those frightened off by this smoke screen recalled him superficially as a beast. In Roddie Minor’s case, she and Crowley talked the matter out, agreeing calmly and amicably to part.

  August’s dog days found Crowley feeling lost without The International, Roddie Minor, and Amalantrah. So he stood at the dock, surrounded by friends, waiting for a morning Albany boat to carry him to his latest Great Magical Retirement on Esopus Island, near the Catskills Mountains on the Hudson River. According to reporter William Seabrook, his only baggage was the tent and canoe that Seabrook had donated to him, plus provisions purchased with a monetary gift from Seabrook. The reporter, however, was disgruntled to discover AC’s curious-looking luggage containing not food but brushes, rope, and fifty gallons of paint. Crowley had only $2.25 left to his name. “For crying out loud,” Seabrook reportedly sniped, contemplating shoving AC into the river, “what are you going to eat?” With a grand, pontifical gesture, Crowley affected the embodiment of his father. “My children, I will be fed as Elijah by the ravens.” Crowley, reading Seabrook’s account twenty-five years later, clarified,