I consider this book the most remarkable and most degenerate book I have ever seen. I am going to stop the sale of it, and will instruct the police to seize every copy found in bookstores in this city. Furthermore, if a chapter of this organization exists in Detroit, we are going to wipe it out. The rites described in The Equinox calls for a sort of conduct we are not going to tolerate in Detroit, if we can prevent it.143
U.S. District Attorney Frank Murphy concurred, calling The Equinox “the most lascivious and libidinous book that has ever been published in the United States”144 and “the most indecent and obscene book I ever have seen.”145 A divorcée soon recounted to Murphy under conditions of anonymity how The Equinox ruined her marriage:
As a result of my husband’s studying this book, my home is wrecked and I am forced to face the world alone and make my own living. Before this book was given to my husband, he was a good man, true, devoted and industrious. Night after night he studied this book. He wanted me to read it, but I soon saw that it was not fit even for beasts. I pleaded with him to give it up, but he refused to do so. Finally he began to go to meetings. He said the book gave him the right to go where he pleased, to do what he pleased and to love whom he pleased. As a result of my experiences, my health is so broken that, while I want to stamp out this book, my physician tells me that if I go into court that I will die, as my heart has been affected.146
In mere days, the news coverage snowballed from uncovering the existence of a secret society in the city of Detroit. On January 12, 1922, Voorheis received a search and seizure warrant, sealing all books in the basement storage facility of Universal Book Stores until they were either turned over to creditors or destroyed. Furthermore, Voorheis pointed out than anyone “publishing, causing to be published, printing, selling, exposing for sale, distributing, exhibiting or even having in his possession any book found to be hurtful to the public morals”147 was subject to a $1,000 fine.
Four private investigators claimed they had been bribed to keep quiet, and “a prominent Detroit attorney” (presumably the same one who had earlier supplied Murphy with details regarding OTO’s activities) found $700 on his desk with a note asking him to shut up. Upon inventorying the book stock, an even more troubling finding emerged: of 2,000 copies of The Equinox printed, only 1,100 became the property of Universal Book Stores. The whereabouts of the 900 other copies then became a concern.
When bankruptcy lawyer Morden showed Voorheis mail order records for The Equinox, the stakes got even higher. If the book was obscene, then sending or receiving it by mail was a federal offense. Postal inspector E. E. Fraser was brought in to determine whether postal laws had been violated, with Voorheis promising, if so, to convene a grand jury to subpoena and prosecute every single person who either produced or purchased the book.
The yellow press believed the answer came with the murder of motion picture director William Desmond Taylor (1872–1922). Investigators of this still-unsolved homicide discovered love letters from nineteen-year-old actress Mary Miles Minter (1902–1984) in Taylor’s copy of White Stains. Furthermore, actresses Mabel Normand (1892–1930), questioned by police as the last person to see Taylor alive, admitted she was a recipient of The Equinox. Indeed, copies of The Equinox had circulated among many Hollywood luminaries (thanks, no doubt, to Crowley’s Hollywood connections Sheridan Bickers and Jane Wolfe). This drove Grover Morden to wild conjecture:
It is possible that the order has obtained a foothold in the picture colony and color is lent this theory by the frequent occurrence of alleged drug orgies among the movie stars.… Some drug crazed maniac or jealous woman of the O.T.O. may have been Taylor’s mysterious assailant.… There are nearly 900 copies [of The Equinox] unaccounted for and there is every reason to believe that the most of these reached the Pacific coast.148
Credence was lent to this theory by the back inside cover of The Equinox. Just as the previous issue contained “Dead Waite,” Crowley’s premature obituary of occult author A. E. Waite, the latest issue contained yet another love note from Crowley to Waite. Titled “Arthur Back From Avalon,” it described Waite’s latest purported exploits by reproducing newspaper headlines about Grand Rapids, Michigan, dentist and murderer coincidentally named Arthur Waite:
Waite Confesses; Gave Poison that Killed Millionaire Peck.
Waite Confesses to Two Murders.
Waite Grins in Telling How He Killed Victims.
To Michiganders for whom the Grand Rapids Waite was far more familiar, Crowley’s send-up of the British writer was mistaken as sympathizing with the killer and advocating murder.
Because Ryerson, as the manager of the Universal Book Stores, was the only name the press could attach to the scandal, he was cast as the love cult’s ringleader. As Crowley recounted,
In Detroit, months after my return to Europe, they repeatedly raided poor half-crazed Ryerson’s house in search of some evidence of the “Devil Worshipper’s Mystic Love Cult” and of course found nothing; from which they concluded not my innocence, but that my pact with the devil contained a clause guaranteeing me against the discovery of my crimes. If any of those obstinate asses had possessed sufficient intelligence to study a single page of my writings, he would have seen at once what ridiculous rubbish were the accusations made against me by foul-minded and illiterate cheats whom I had never so much as met.149
The other members of the Great Lakes Council were understandably nervous about being subjected to the same treatment and having their names dragged through the mud. Thus a deal was worked out between Universal Book Stores’ main stockholder: he would not sue (and, as a Mason, was forbidden from doing so anyway) provided Ryerson would not name any of the other members. He agreed, and in the end, bankruptcy referee George A. Marston ruled the questioning out of order.
At the end of 1922, Ryerson’s name again filled headlines in a divorce case that served as a final cautionary tale regarding Detroit’s love cult. Having parted from Bertha Bruce (they had filled out a marriage license but never filed it with the city), Ryerson, at age forty, wed eighteen-year-old model Mazie Mitchell on a thirty-day trial basis. When she sued for divorce twenty-nine days after their wedding, Ryerson’s role in the scandal—and his ongoing interest in the ancients’ worship of sex—returned to the headlines. She accused him of beating her. He accused her of being previously married.
Ryerson’s last public statement about the OTO controversy in which he became embroiled is both succinct and tragic:
I was not a part of the official organization nor never was invited, neither was I its head.… When trouble came and unsavory notoriety, I was made the “goat”.… I have in my silence practically laid down my life for my friends, who have not shown any disposition to help me in this awful trouble, allowing me to stand the brunt of it all alone when they know I am entirely innocent of any complicity in the matter.
My home has been completely ransacked at various intervals, my papers and books seized, my servants bribed, my library robbed, and I have been persecuted beyond endurance by people seeking evidence concerning the O.T.O. which has been in error dubbed a love cult and which never had any active existence in Detroit.150
He then moved to Georgia, remarried, and disappeared from public life until his 1931 death in Florida.151 The drama in Detroit, however, was a prelude to an unprecedented “mess in the press” that would soon confront Crowley.
When James Branch Cabell expanded his short tale “Some Ladies and Jurgen” into the critically acclaimed libertine fantasy Jurgen—the most ambitious prose saga since Byron’s Don Juan—Crowley and the blue Equinox became the center of another American scandal. After the book went through three printings, the public began crying out against the phallic symbolism of the hero’s lance, staff, and sword. Outrage swelled until January 14, 1920, when John Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice marched into Robert M. McBride and Co., seized the plates and all copies of Jurgen, and presented book department manager Guy Holt with a summons on
charges of violating Section 1141 of New York’s penal code.
Much of the controversy, it turned out, involved Chapter XXII, “As to a Veil He Broke,” which Cabell based upon the Gnostic Mass. In this part of the book, Jurgen travels to the land of Cocaigne, whose pagan philosophy was “Do that which seems good to you.” Here, Jurgen encounters Queen Anaitis and conducts what is essentially a Gnostic Mass:
Then Jurgen raised Queen Anaitis so that she sat upon the altar, and that which was there before tumbled to the ground. Anaitis placed together the tips of her thumbs and other fingers, so that her hands made an open triangle.…
Then Anaitis said: “Yea, for I speak with the tongue of every woman, and I shine in the eyes of every woman, when the lance is lifted. To serve me is better than all else. When you invoke me with a heart wherein is kindled the serpent flame, if but for a moment, you will understand the delights of my garden, what joy unwordable pulsates therein, and how potent is the sole desire which uses all of a man. To serve me you will then be eager to surrender whatever else is in your life: and other pleasures you will take with your left hand, not thinking of them entirely: for I am the desire which uses all of a man, and so wastes nothing. And I accept you, I yearn toward you, I who am daughter and somewhat more than daughter to the Sun. I who am all pleasure, all ruin, and a drunkenness of the inmost sense, desire you.”
Now Jurgen held his lance erect before Anaitis.…152
Crowley, duly flattered, called Cabell’s work “the best book that has yet to come out of U.S.A.” and “an incomparable splendour, a star of the first magnitude blazing in the firmament.”153 Cabell stood trial on October 16, 1922. Although John Quinn believed the case hopeless, Cabell successfully argued that the lance ceremony in his book had a real model, one that was already in print in the blue Equinox. Cabell was acquitted on October 19, and the resulting popularity transformed him into a literary giant.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Abbey of Thelema
Crowley returned to his war-ravaged homeland just before Christmas, finding merrie olde England much like he remembered it: cold, damp and dreary. It was only the first misery he would find awaiting him. Having no place to live, he stayed with his aunt at the same Eton Lodge abode that he, in The Fatherland, had challenged Count Zeppelin to level. As he wrote at the time, “Not only has the war changed nothing in this house of my aunt’s where I have roosted, but they haven’t altered the position of a piece of furniture since Queen Victoria came to the throne.”1
When the weather flared his chronic bronchitis into asthma, Crowley turned to his physician since 1898, Harold Batty Shaw (1866–1936), a specialist in consumption and chest diseases. A man of abnormal energy and strong opinions, Shaw was educated at Yorkshire College, Leeds, and University College, London. He gave the 1896 Goulstonian Lectures before the Royal College of Physicians a year before earning his MD degree and two years before joining the Royal College’s ranks. His students at University College and Brompton Hospital found a dogmatic and precise teacher in him. His most famous patient was arguably Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920).2 For Crowley, Shaw prescribed a common analgesic: heroin.3 Despite his physician’s credentials, Crowley became dependent on what was then a legal if not efficacious drug. Alas, passage of the British Dangerous Drug Act in 1921 would leave Crowley in a predicament, as will be seen later.
For now, he was destitute. The money and possessions he had put into storage before the war had vanished: doubtlessly, he believed, at the hands of Cowie and Waddell. Although Crowley inherited £3,000 on his mother’s death, the provisions of his divorce settlement earmarked the money for a trust fund to be split between himself and his daughter, Lola Zaza.
When Crowley checked to see how his old friend Oscar Eckenstein had fared since the war had interrupted their planned attempt on Kangchenjunga, he found him a stodgy married man, and never saw him again. While AC’s disappointment is thinly veiled, the inescapable truth is that Eckenstein was sixty-one years old at this point, to Crowley’s forty-four. Furthermore, in the years since their 1902 expedition, Eckenstein had remained far more active in the sport than Crowley: he continued climbing until at least 1912, when he was fifty-three. In 1908 he redesigned the crampon into the prototype from which modern designs derive; he invented an innovative short ice-ax; and he published technical articles on knot-tying and on the use of nails on climbing boots.4 Eckenstein died of consumption shortly thereafter in 1921.
The final straw was the yellow press rolling out the welcome mat in its inimitable style. John Bull greeted Crowley with the headline:
Another Traitor Trounced
Career and Condemnation of the Notorious Aleister Crowley
The article read, “We await an assurance from the Home Office or the Foreign Office that steps are being taken to arrest the renegade or to prevent his infamous feet ever again polluting our shores.”5 Although the attack upset Crowley, he followed the I Ching’s advice to do nothing. Fortunately, Commodore Gaunt interceded to advise authorities against taking action. Thus, while public opinion of Crowley remained low, nothing came of the outcry.
Knowing there had to be something better than this, feeling himself caught up in a new magical current, he wired Leah to meet him in Paris. She arrived eight months pregnant and with Hansi in tow. On January 11, a year after Leah first became the Scarlet Woman, they swore to build an Abbey of Thelema.
At this time, Leah described to AC how, on the boat from America, she befriended a French woman, Augustine Louise Hélène Fraux Shumway, nicknamed Ninette (1894–1990). Born in Decazeville, France, on June 9, 1894, she had lived in the United States since 1911, marrying American Howard C. Shumway in 1915, who died in an automobile accident before their son, Howard, was born in Boston on July 17, 1916. Ninette found work as a nursery governess, but with no family to help support her, she decided to leave Concord, Massachuestts, and return to her homeland, where she could leave Howard in the care of her parents, get a governess job, and possibly help with the reconstruction of France.6 Crowley could practically read Leah’s mind and agreed that they would need a governess for their new child. Besides, Howard would be an ideal playmate for Hansi. Recognizing another kismet in the Great Work, he arranged to meet Mrs. Shumway in Paris and offer her a position.
A pallid, wilted woman of twenty-five, she stood five feet, two inches tall with gray eyes and brown hair, listlessly holding her child’s hand. Ninette Shumway reminded him of Ratan Devi. The boy was as white and lifeless as her, clinging tightly to his mother and crying incessantly. “They gave me the shock of my life,” Crowley recalled.7 Offered a job, Ninette, in well-spoken but imperfect English, accepted. She returned with Crowley to Fontainebleau, where they and Leah stayed in a rented house at 11-bis rue de Neuville. Here, Crowley pondered potential locations for his Abbey of Thelema.
Ninette Shumway (1894–1990) and her son, Howard. (photo credit 14.1)
On January 30, Crowley called on his old mistress, Jane Chéron, hoping to make love, smoke opium, and catch up with Walter Duranty. He struck out on all three counts: Duranty was still on assignment in Russia for the New York Times, and Chéron was disinclined to both sex and drugs. However, when Crowley prepared to leave empty-handed, Jane insisted, “Shut your eyes!” Then she unfurled a piece of cloth and told him he could look.
His stunned eyes beheld a four-foot silk appliqué reproduction of the Stele of Revealing. She explained that in February 1917 she and her “young man”—almost certainly Duranty—searched the south of France for a cure for opium addiction. Suffering from insomnia, she awoke one day after dozing off to realize she had drawn, in her sleep, a reproduction of the Stele. This so impressed her that she spent the next three months reproducing it in silk. Such a labor from a woman uninterested in magick also impressed Crowley. That this encounter should come at such a crucial time in his life was, to Crowley, an unmistakable sign that he was on the right course with this Abbey business.
A
C’s priapic tendencies did not end with Chéron. He continued writing passionate letters to the distant and faceless Jane Wolfe: “Now I see you before me shining in the dark—I turn out the lights for a little—I hold you closely—our light kindles—.”8 Impatient for her to visit, he arranged a meeting in Bou-Sâada on June 25, the place and date of his Magister Templi initiation.
Eventually, however, his desires found a more practical object: Ninette Shumway. It began innocently enough, the two taking long walks in the country while Leah convalesced. Crowley soon dubbed her “Beauty,” and Shummy, as she was otherwise known, found him increasingly attractive. Then, one afternoon after lunch at the Barbison, Beauty and the Beast walked in the Fontainebleau forest. The vernal weather made them feel young, the wine made them giddy, and the danger made her irresistible. They chased each other through the glade and finally fell into each other’s arms with a passionate clasp. Crowley and Shummy soon began doing sex magick to locate a suitable Abbey.
Curiously enough, Leah did not object. She knew that, as the Scarlet Woman, she was number one in Crowley’s book. Furthermore, she understood the promiscuous interpretation of “Love under will” and found it was one Crowley encouraged without double standards. Ninette, however, brooded jealously and insecurely about sharing her man.
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