Thus, on November 23, 1918, Jones had written to W. T. Smith, “There is a possibility that the rituals may be revised, and the Words of the first Two Degrees correctly given, and the Masonic connection made less in evidence.”76 In a letter to Jones that February, Crowley himself wrote, “I am then determined to revise the rituals of the OTO in such a sense that they will not conflict in any way with the Masonic ideals.”77
After a while, Universal Book Stores’ stockholders, initially enthusiastic about the deal, developed reservations because they didn’t understand The Equinox’s contents; Ryerson assured them that, as an occult book, it would have a ready market. Just over two weeks before the release date, he reported to Crowley on March 4, 1919, “Our work is stirring up the opposition of the churches.”78 Crowley’s light-hearted reply offered little solace:
Cheer up little book store, don’t you cry;
You will be a barroom bye and bye,
Where the Right Wine of Iacchus will be dispensed.79
Ryerson’s mistress, Bertha Bruce, whom Crowley shared during his visits to Detroit, became his next Scarlet Woman. She was the presumptive priestess of the Detroiters’ Gnostic Mass, and known locally as “Bruce of the OTO.” To her, Crowley wrote the following lines:
Almira
To Bertha Almira Bruce
Strong poison of thy mouth, my love, faint amber of thy breath,
A fierce red wine that sucks me down a drunkard into death.
Snake of my soul, thou leapest up to feed upon my brain
That thrills and sobs wild music to the murder-lust refrain!
Come, there’s a tent pitched on the sand; the camel-bells ring clear;
The stars are violent like young suns—I will to have thee here.
Why linger in the moody north? There’s welcome in the south.
Strong poison of thy mouth, my love, strong poison of thy mouth.
Detroit, 191880
Two summers later, while living in Cefalù, Crowley was still thinking of this “sexual and magical partner,” counting her as the fifth of his five Scarlet Women to date, writing “Almira, whose vocation I cannot doubt, seems to have failed altogether, unless she gave me that very non-attachment I so needed. But I cannot make out whether she is still in office.”81 That office would next be filled by Leah Hirsig (1883–1975).
On their first meeting, Hirsig was simply tagging along with her older sister, Marian Dockerill,82 who had previously met AC at one of his lectures. As he described the lecture, “Among my hearers was only one bearing even a remote resemblance to the human species, an old lady painted to resemble the cover of a popular magazine.”83 This “old lady” was actually three years younger than Crowley and had previously been involved in several of what she would call “love cults.” Her sister Leah was a thin woman with a boyish figure, standing five-foot-eight in height. Crowley felt an irresistible urge to draw close and kiss her on the lips. To his surprise, she offered no resistance. In fact, she liked it. While Crowley did his best to participate in a conversation with her sibling, he found himself unable to do much more than rain kisses upon Leah. Her sister nearly had to pry them apart when the time came to leave.
Brooklyn schoolteacher Leah Hirsig (1883–1975). (photo credit 13.7)
That was in the spring of 1918. Hirsig called on Crowley a second time three seasons later, on January 11, 1919. She was attending law classes at New York University and wanted Crowley’s advice on Greenwich Village accommodations. This time they spoke, and Crowley learned she was thirty-six years old, born on April 9, 1883, at Trachselwald in Berne, Switzerland. She was the youngest of ten children born to Magdalena Lüginbühl (1845–1923) and Gottlieb Hirsig (1844–1933).84 Her father was a drunkard and her mother fled with her children to New York City in April 1885 when Leah was age two. Her siblings now lived in places as remote as Switzerland, New York, Florida, and Argentina. At age twenty-one she became an elementary school teacher of music. When Crowley met her, she was teaching at Public School No. 40, located in the Bronx at Prospect Avenue and Jennings Street.85 On November 13, 1917, she gave birth in Florida to Hans Hammond (1917–1985), whom Leah named after her brother. Hans Hammond was purportedly the son of Edward Jack Hammond, whom Leah said died around the same time.86 Crowley, however, reports that the boy’s father was actually someone named Edward Carter;87 if so, then this person may well be related to Samuel S. Carter (1864–1951) of St. Petersburg, Florida, who shortly thereafter married Leah’s sister, Fanny.88 Whatever the story, Leah’s son lived in Florida with his aunt and uncle while his mother sent what she could from her earnings to support him.
When they finished talking, Crowley walked up to Leah and undressed her. As when he first kissed her, she offered no resistance. “Let her be shameless before men,” Crowley recalled Aiwass’s description of the Scarlet Woman from The Book of the Law. He looked at her naked body: a lean-hipped, small-breasted, and slender form surmounted by a wedge-shaped face adorned with large warm eyes and supple lips. They made love, and afterward Crowley, feeling awkward with his forward approach, took up his sketchbook. “What shall I paint you as?” he asked.
“Paint me as a dead soul.”
The night offered Crowley no repose. Images of Leah as a dead soul filled his restless mind. Sleepless, he left bed to examine his sketch and discovered that, standing the dead soul vertically, he saw it in a new light. In a spasm of inspiration, he worked till dawn to paint his Dead Souls on a trifold screen. The center panel depicted Leah, ghastly, emaciated, and green; a gross, admiring woman flanked her left and a huddled, agonized woman her right. Disfigured heads littered the bottom of all three screens. It pleased him.
In an interview with an Atlanta-area newspaper, Crowley gave a different account of this painting’s genesis, doubtlessly tailored to make better copy:
I walked up to a blank canvas one day and, standing very close to it, I placed the wet brush before it and shut my eyes. I had no preconceived idea of what I was going to paint. My hand simply moved automatically over the canvas.
I don’t know how long I worked in that subconscious way, but you can imagine my astonishment when I found that I had painted a likeness of a friend whom I hadn’t seen in many years. It was that person’s dead soul I had painted.89
Although lacking veracity (for example, Crowley hadn’t yet known Leah for years), this version sheds new light on the Dead Soul’s oft-repeated origin.
When Leah visited later that day, Crowley kissed and stripped her again, powerless to repress the attraction between them. He did a banishing ritual and consecrated her as his Scarlet Woman. Shortly thereafter, he and Leah moved into larger accommodations on the third floor of 63 Washington Square South, overlooking 5th Avenue.90
In February the press interviewed Crowley in his studio to promote an exhibition of his art at Greenwich Village’s Liberal Club, the epicenter of New York’s bohemian scene and dubbed “A Meeting Place for Those Interested in New Ideas.” The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette called him “The newest sensation in Greenwich Village.” Neatly dressed and groomed, however, Crowley did not look like a stereotypical artist; and his art was anything but conventional. The Syracuse Herald captured the effect of first entering the room:
The walls of this studio are covered with the wildest maelstrom of untamed and unrelated colors ever confined under one roof. They look like a collision between a Scandinavian sunset and a paint-as-you-please exhibit of the Independent Artists association.
The effect is riotous, blinding—but not distressing, after one gets used to it. Mr. Crowley helps one to do that, with a dash of cognac, an imported cigarette and a delightful personality.
“Study art?” he told the reporter. “Never have and never intend to. What sort of artist am I? Oh, I don’t know just what to call myself. I’d say, off-hand, that I was an old master, because I’m a painter mostly of dead souls.” Although Crowley does not acknowledge the influence, his concept of painting “dead souls” is clearly influenced by
the psychochromes or soul-paintings of Leon Engers Kennedy; Crowley’s approach, however, was decidedly different.
His method involved approaching the canvas with his eyes closed; next, as he explained to the Wilkes-Barre Times, his hand, moving automatically, “wanders into the realm of dead souls and very frequently the result is the likeness of some living person.” Elaborating, Crowley remarked, “But please, whatever you do, don’t call me a cubist or a futurist or anything queer like that. I guess you might call me a subconscious impressionist, or something on that order. My art really is subconscious and automatic.” When the Evening World magazine asked about the Vanity Fair biography that praised him as a great poet and explorer, Crowley lamented, “Alas, he had me all wrong. My only claim to distinction is as a painter.”
Significantly, these interviews included descriptions of, and Crowley’s comments on, several pieces from this period: A Day Dream of Dead Hats depicted “a lady asleep on a veranda, while the spirits of bygone bonnets pass over a mystic bridge on the heads of a dozen undressed ladies.” Crowley explained, “Most women dream of dead bonnets when they take a nap.” Of his watercolor The Burmese Lady, he remarked, “If you look at it closely you will discover that it is none other than our old friend, Bennett.” Pointing to another, he said, “That fluffy one dancing on one toe is supposed to be the dead spirit of Eva Tanguay.” Of his large three-paneled Screen of the Dead Souls. Crowley said,
All those figures you see on it are dead souls in various stages of decomposition. That central figure in the middle panel is the queen of the dead souls. Of course you recognized the head looking over her shoulder. That’s Hearst. Over her other shoulder is Oscar Wilde. I don’t know how he got in there, because I really hate him. The parrot sitting on the head of the dead lady’s soul in the third panel is one that belongs to Bob Chanler.91
He also had a story for his painting of French actress Madame Yorska92 with her head thrown backward, a jeweled dagger in her throat:
I got that impression at some affair given in Greenwich Village at which a certain violinist played. Madame Yorska was there. The violinist, in rendering one striking piece, asked that the lights be turned low. While he was playing I saw Madame Yorska throw her head back and close her eyes. I carried the impression of that long white throat home with me. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. During the night I got up and going to the canvas closed my eyes and that picture was the result.
Asked about the dagger, Crowley explained “Oh, that long sweeping white line of throat had to be cut somewhere, and I couldn’t think of any better way to cut a throat than with a dagger. So I stuck the knife into it. Rather good effect, I think.” Other works on display for the press included Ella Wheeler Wilcox and the Swami (“One of my best works, that”), Is This the Face That Launched a Thousand Ships? (“something I did in rather a hurry”),93 and Young Bolshevik Girl with Wart Looking at Trotsky. “My pictures look more beautiful,” Crowley instructed, “if you look at them with your eyes closed.”94
Limousines carried uptown passengers to the premiere of Crowley’s parade of grotesque figures and landscapes in the salon. Here, they found the smiling artist decked out in a lemon waistcoat with knickers. While viewers remarked ambiguously, “Oh, how symbolic!” even the conservative members of the club, wary of hosting someone as notorious as Crowley, could find nothing immoral or offensive in the twenty-three pencil and chalk drawings, forty-eight watercolors, and twenty oils.
“Dear Mr. Crowley,” an older woman asked about the piece titled May Morn, “won’t you please explain the meaning of this picture?” Set in a large field, the painting depicted an ecstatic woman dancer, a corpse hanging by a noose from a dead tree, and a bearded figure peeking from behind the tree. It was Crowley’s interpretation of the demise of Christianity.
“Certainly, madam. The painting represents the dawn of a day following a witches’ celebration as described in Faust. The witch is hanged, as she deserves, and the satyr looks out from behind a tree. In the background, all is a beautiful spring and a nymph dances joyously to the piping of a shepherd.”
Satisfied, she smiled and replied, “How very charming!”95
Back at the Universal Book Stores, Jones was in charge of sales and marketing for The Equinox. He did his best to stir up interest in Thelema and the works of the Master Therion, giving lectures for sympathetic audiences. The Friday after his arrival in February, Jones gave a talk on kabbalah to the TS. He soon started a Sunday afternoon study group on the then-unpublished Liber Aleph. He also began a series of weekly Monday lectures at the Universal Book Stores, beginning with a lesson on astral journeys. He promoted these talks with a flyer whose flipside advertised The Equinox. 96 In addition, he began holding private meetings at his apartment on other weeknights. Before long he was teaching four days out of the week. On one Friday night, he lectured on “Eastern and Western Methods of Attainment” to a crowd of 150 at the Rosebud Club.97 Another speaker at the store’s Woodward Avenue location was a man named Russell;98 this may well have been C. F. Russell, who is recorded in the 1920 census as living at the same address as Jones.
The official organ of the AA proclaimed the Law of Thelema at the price of $6.66 per copy when Volume III, Number 1 of The Equinox went on sale that spring. Nicknamed the “blue Equinox” for the color of its cover, the book contained, according to Crowley, “a complete programme of my proposed Operation to initiate, emancipate and relieve mankind,”99 including a syllabus of AA instructions, various tracts on Thelema, and many organizational and historical documents of OTO. Among these was “Liber LII,” the revised OTO Manifesto, which Crowley considered singularly important.
Liber LII was difficult to compose, but I was so sick of the stacks of diplomas that people sent me from all parts of the world it was plainly unpractical. So I did what the Alexandria crowd did with all the confused and confusing religions of the period: lumped them anyhow and called it Christianity.100
The issue also contained “Hymn to Pan,” “The Sevenfold Sacrament,” “The Book of the Heart Girt with the Serpent,” and the Gnostic Mass. Corresponding to “The Temple of Solomon the King” from the first volume of The Equinox was “A Master of the Temple,” the first installment of an account of Frater Achad’s magical career up to the grade of Magister Templi (8°=3°). Achad also contributed the essay, “Stepping out of the Old Aeon into the New.” Finally, the supplement contained H. P. Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence, with Crowley’s commentary. As he wrote about this important book:
The Voice of the Silence is the only Theosophical publication of the slightest literary distinction or even of occult merit. This new edition is far more valuable to students than any previously published because the meaning of the treatise is for the first time made plain by the commentary of Frater O.M. No Theosophist can afford to miss buying a copy.101
Crowley hoped—in vain—to issue a sixty-cent version through E. P. Dutton.
The issue also contained two color plates: one was a portrait of Crowley in his robes, painted by Leon Engers Kennedy. The New York Times Book Review described it as follows:
It [The Equinox] starts with a portrait of the most occult of all the occult, the innermost of all the Inwards, the Master Therion, otherwise known as To Mega Therion, which is to say The Big Brute.… The Big Brute is not very formidable looking: he sits half way in and half way out of a scarlet kimono before a blaze of yellow light, contemplating something firmly clutched between thumb and finger which seems most plausibly to be a hair from a head fast growing bald.102
Portrait of Aleister Crowley by Leon Engers Kennedy from The Equinox III(1). (photo credit 13.8)
The other was Crowley’s “May Morn.” Contrary to the sanitized description that the artist had offered at his exhibit, The Equinox described it thus:
The picture is symbolical of the New Æon. From the blasted stump of dogma, the poison oak of ‘original sin,’ is hanged the hag with dyed and bloody hair, Christianity.… The satyr [is] a
portrait of Frater D.D.S., one of the Teachers of The Master Therion.… The Shepherd and the Nymph in the background represent the spontaneous outburst of the music of sound and motion caused by the release of the Children of the New Æon from the curse of the dogma of Original Sin, and other priestly bogies.
After reading this description, the members of the Liberal Club were horrified, excitedly contemplating the appropriate response. Although one piped in, “Burn them,” cooler heads prevailed. They stripped Crowley’s paintings from the walls and phoned him with instructions to retrieve his pictures immediately.
Optimism ran high on the heels of the book’s release. Ryerson reported that “Brentano’s in New York gave The Equinox a very nice display and they sent us some money for the sale of it afterwards.”103 Jones also celebrated the book’s release by dining with eleven others at the Fellow Crafter’s Club.104 After psychical researcher Hereward Carrington (1880–1958) called the first volume of The Equinox “a veritable mine of occult lore, and real knowledge” in an article on “What Is the Best ‘Psychical’ Literature?” Crowley presented a copy of the new issue to the American Society for Psychical Research.105
Crowley, in fact, got to know Carrington when he first arrived in America. As Carrington recounts,
It was soon after World War I started that I received a visit from the most remarkable man I have ever known.… My visitor brought with him a letter of introduction from the Hon. Everard Feilding, then Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research. It read:
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