At 5 o’clock on the morning of Thursday, January 26, Leah’s water broke. She went to the hospital in Fontainebleau and, after an easy labor, gave birth to a daughter at 12:05 that afternoon. She looked like her mother except for the mouth, which was unmistakably Crowley’s. On March 8, Leah returned home from the hospital.
Ever the magician, AC named the baby Anne Lea—after the goddess of summer and the Scarlet Woman, respectively—thus giving her the monogram AL, the Hebrew name of God and the key to The Book of the Law. However, when little Howard declared during a walk in the forest, “I shall call her Poupée,” the name (French for “doll”) was so spontaneous and appropriate that they unanimously adopted it as her nickname.
Shortly after Poupée’s birth, Ninette herself became pregnant.
Although the I Ching directed them to locate the Abbey in Cefalù, Italy, they lacked the money to do so. Thus, on March 21, Crowley took Leah and Poupée to London, where Leah stayed with AC’s aunt and arranged finances with his lawyer; evidently, Crowley had £700 coming in another inheritance. He then fetched Shummy and “the brats” from France and proceeded toward Cefalù. He thought it a good omen that his train seat was number 31, a key value in The Book of the Law. The money arrived for them in Naples on March 30, allowing them to continue to their destination.
Cefalù was a small seaport with only one main street, located northwest of Sicily and thirty-seven miles from Palermo. In ancient times, when known as Cephaloedium, it allied with Carthage in 396 BC and was taken by the Moors in 858 AD. More recently, it was known for its marble quarries and the cathedral built by the great Norman hero Count Roger. Here, one night in a dingy hotel changed their lives. When Crowley swore not to stay another day in such despicable lodgings, Giordana Giosus overheard and told them he had a villa for rent. Crowley, again seeing fate’s hand, agreed to view the place.
A sinuous path just beyond town wound up the mountainside to an eighteenth-century villa known as the Villa Santa Barbara. Located south of the rock of Cephaloedium and just beyond a Capuchin monastery, it faced the sea amid a field of grass, trees, and a garden. It was a single-story stone structure, encased in plaster and painted all white except for the red-tiled floor. Five rooms and a shelf-lined pantry flanked its large central room, which Crowley immediately saw as a temple.9
Crowley assessed the place rapidly. Despite a complete lack of plumbing, gas, and electricity, it had everything he needed: a temple, access to water, and rocks to climb. The size was ample. And near the building, Crowley noted two Persian nut trees; just as they were a sign for the Villa Caldarazzo in 1911, so in Crowley’s mind were they good omens for Cefalù. He struck a deal on the spot to rent the Villa Santa Barbara as the Abbey of Thelema.
They moved in immediately and that evening blessed the grounds with an act of sex magick. “Salutation to the Gods and Goddesses of this place! May they grant us abundance of all good things, and inspire me to the creation of beauty,”10 he wrote in his journal. And so the Inglesi, Sigñor Caroli, began to prepare the Abbey of Thelema. He dubbed the main building the “Whore’s Cell,” and turned the main room into a temple: he painted a circle on the floor and placed in its center an altar, a copy of the stele, The Book of the Law, numerous candles, and other implements. The Throne of the Beast sat in the east, facing the altar in the center of the room. The Scarlet Woman’s throne sat across from this, in the west. Statues of various gods were placed around the room. The temple, according to Crowley’s design, would be open to all students at the Abbey.
The children soon quit sniveling and became active, healthy boys, Hansi taking to swimming and Howie to chess. Crowley would approach the boys in the morning and point to the sky. “Up there is the sun. When it gets over there, you may come back.” Thus he sent them off to play, and they would invariably return with fruits stolen from local farms or Sicilian bread given to them by the farmers. Equally often, one or both lost their clothes. And they were always full of stories of the day’s adventures.
For Crowley, this was paradise.
The question “Why Cefalù?” naturally arises, and the answer lies in a confluence of several influences. One was the migration to Italy of the literati he admired. Much as he was an individualist, Crowley nevertheless emulated those he esteemed, and validated himself by comparison to them. Thus he modeled not only his poetic style but even the byline of Aceldama (1898) after Shelley; when he left Cambridge without a degree, he followed the footsteps of Byron, Shelley, Swinburne, and Tennyson; after introductions by Gerald Kelly, he became a fixture at Le Chat Blanc in Paris; and he followed Allan Bennett and Oscar Eckenstein to India. Years later, when commenting on being expelled from Italy, Crowley would remark tellingly, “Like Mr. H. G. Wells and many other distinguished Englishmen, my presence was not desired by Mussolini.”11
Another impetus stemmed from his newfound love of art and the model presented by postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). Gauguin was a successful stockbroker whose pursuit of painting led him to abandon his career, wife, and children. In 1891, at age forty-three, he moved to Tahiti and married a native girl. He moved into a cottage that he called the “House of Carnal Pleasure” and filled it with his paintings. Similarly, Crowley, having himself squandered his fortune and divorced his wife, had, at age forty-four, moved to a remote villa he dubbed the “Whore’s Cell” to pursue art. The influence of Gauguin is unmistakable; Crowley paid the painter a high honor by adding his name to the list of saints in his Gnostic Mass in 1921. The versions published in The International (1918) and the blue Equinox (1919) do not contain his name, although subsequent editions do. Clearly, Crowley regarded Gauguin as a kindred spirit.
Crowley’s works are relatively silent on the topic of Paul Gauguin; so what prompted this interest in the painter nearly twenty years after his death? Crowley did not say, although one possibility exists in W. Somerset Maugham’s fictionalization of Gauguin’s life, The Moon and Sixpence (1919), which had just come out. It is easy to imagine Crowley identifying with protagonist Charles Strickland, a man whose single-minded devotion to art ruined his finances and family and even drove his wife to suicide. Strickland’s comment,
“I don’t want love.… I am a man, and sometimes I want a woman. When I’ve satisfied my passion I’m ready for other things. I can’t overcome my desire, but I hate it; it imprisons my spirit; I look forward to the time when I shall be free from all desire and can give myself without hindrance to my work.”12
is echoed epigrammatically by Crowley: “The stupidity of having had to waste uncounted priceless hours in chasing what ought to have been brought to the back door every evening with the milk!”13 Crowley and Strickland even shared a passion for chess. Maugham’s description of the artist’s mural-covered walls in Tahiti is especially evocative:
From floor to ceiling the walls were covered with a strange and elaborate composition. It was indescribably wonderful and mysterious. It took his breath away. It filled him with an emotion which he could not understand or analyse. He felt the awe and the delight which a man might feel who watched the beginning of a world. It was tremendous, sensual, passionate; and yet there was something horrible there, too, something which made him afraid. It was the work of a man who had delved into the hidden depths of nature and had discovered secrets which were beautiful and fearful too. It was the work of a man who knew things which it is unholy for men to know. There was something primeval there and terrible. It was not human. It brought to his mind vague recollections of black magic. It was beautiful and obscene.14
As will be seen, this idea would greatly influence Crowley.
While there is no evidence that Crowley actually read The Moon and Sixpence, Maugham’s book fits chronologically. There’s also an appealing justice to think that the author who modeled Oliver Haddo after Crowley later influenced Crowley to model himself after another of his characters: art imitating life, and life imitating art.
On April 14, Leah and Poupée arrived at the Abbe
y to complete the family. She and Crowley signed the lease to the villa as Sir Alastor de Kerval and Contessa Léa Harcourt. In this spiritual haven, they donned new names: Crowley became Beast; Leah was Alostrael, Virgin Guardian of the Sangraal; Ninette was Cypris; Howie and Hansi became Hermes and Dionysus. And Poupée, who arrived ill from England, drank goat’s milk, which nourished Jupiter.
They quickly developed a schedule for work at the Abbey: every morning, Leah would rise, strike a gong, and proclaim the Law of Thelema. Everyone present, even the children, would respond with “Love is the law, love under will.” Everyone would follow with the solar salutations of “Liber Resh” (to be practiced morning, noon, sunset, and midnight). Sitting down to a breakfast prepared by Ninette, they would “Say Will,” which was Crowley’s answer to grace. He would begin meals by rapping on the table to call all to attention. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” the diners would say. Crowley, in response, would ask, “What is thy will?”
“It is my will to eat and drink,” came the reply.
“To what end?”
“That my body may be fortified thereby,” came the reply.
“To what end?” he pressed on.
“That I may accomplish the Great Work.”
With that, Crowley would declare, “Love is the law, love under will.” This ritual—or some variation thereon—began the meal. They would then eat in contemplative silence. These progressive questions betrayed his father’s influence, recalling Edward “Get-Right-with-God” Crowley’s repeated use of the question “And then what?” to lead up to his own trademark statement.
Aside from these regimented tasks, the rules permitted individual work and study. Climbing, swimming, studying, and writing filled most days; Ninette, after finishing her housework, took long walks. And in keeping with his philosophy, Beast bought drugs from a Palermo pusher named Amatore and made them available to all residents of the Abbey; his goal was not to encourage drugs, but to make them so readily accessible that he removed all temptation.
With routine at the Abbey established, all that remained was to send invitations to his students.
Leah’s arrival on April 14 left Ninette intensely bitter and jealous. In her experience, Leah had always been a convalescing and nonthreatening other woman, and even though she knew better, Ninette felt on top of the situation. She enjoyed having Beast all to herself while Leah was in England, but now the master bedroom belonged to Leah. The Virgin Guardian of the Sangraal commanded Beast’s attention and affection, and Ninette felt rejected.
On April 20, less than a week after Leah’s arrival, their ménage à trois slipped into an emotional morass. That night, all three got intoxicated and aroused; Beast, following an intense sexual performance, jokingly remarked, “You girls would wear out any man’s tool, were it steel or stone. Would God that you were Lesbians and I could sleep alone!” Leah, taking the jibe goodheartedly, made mock overtures toward Ninette, who grabbed a thin cloak to cover her nakedness and dashed into the rain. Crowley cursed and pursued her, fearing what mischief she might discover in her recklessness. Meanwhile Leah fumed, seeing through Shummy’s attention-getting ploy and knocking back some more liquor. Eventually she persuaded Howard to call for his mother.
An hour of searching finally uncovered Beauty, whom Beast convinced to return home. Ushering her into the Whore’s Cell—past Leah, who cursed drunkenly at her—and into bed, Beast emerged to find Leah vomiting. He soothed her next. Finally, he produced his manuscript of the Tao Teh King and recited from it to return their minds to a higher plane. As he read, he smirked inwardly. “Next please! Let’s all live up to ‘Never dull where Crowley is.’ ”15
The following day, Poupée’s health worsened visibly. Unable to absorb food, she was literally wasting away. This was precisely the augury which the I Ching had given for Poupée’s birth: Hexagram XLI, Diminution. Beast consulted her progressed astrological chart and found Saturn and the sun both opposing Mars: this was bad, and he feared she might not live through the week. “I have been howling like a mad creature nearly all day,” he recorded in his journal. “I want my epitaph to be, ‘Half a woman made with half a god.’ ”16
To take his mind off his troubles, Beast immersed himself in writing and painting. If he was lucky, he slept at odd times, but in the main he suffered chronic insomnia. And, even though Poupée survived the next week without incident, Crowley’s symptoms continued. This was because the insomnia was not due to stress but to his continuing abuse of heroin and cocaine.
Crowley soon found himself with two expectant “wives” when Leah became pregnant again that May.
On June 21, Leah was with Beast on a train to meet Jane Wolfe. However, he left her in Palermo and continued alone to his rendezvous in Tunis. Beast had become obsessed with the mystery of Jane Wolfe. Having reconsidered summoning Jane to a summer clime as inhospitable as Bou-Sâada’s, he had wired her to meet him in Tunis instead. “I adore her name,” he anticipated her arrival. “I hope she is hungry and cruel as a wolf.” In his diary, he wrote,
I am hers.… I die that She may live.… I drown in delight at the thought that I who have been Master of the Universe should lie beneath Her feet, Her slave, Her victim, eager to be abased.17
His health failed in Tunis, and he recorded in his diary, “A most unpleasant day of severe illness. I think I may have been poisoned by reading Conan Doyle.”18 More likely, his illness stemmed from the same sanitary conditions at Cefalù that had given Leah dysentery a month earlier.
When the appointed day came and went without Jane Wolfe’s arrival, Crowley filled himself with cocaine and wrote “Leah Sublime,” a poem dedicated to his Scarlet Woman. While not as subtle or artistic as the poems he wrote for Rose, it certainly holds a unique place in Crowley’s corpus, collecting all his filth into one poem. Its most memorable (and polite) lines were:
Stab your demonical
Smile to my brain!
Soak me in cognac
Cunt and cocaine …19
By July 3, Crowley impatiently scribbled in his diary, “I shall certainly not wait for more than two weeks for her, one only has to wait three for Syphilis herself.” After a few more fruitless days, he gave up. Crowley returned to Cefalù on July 10.
At this time, Crowley was undergoing what Norman Mudd would later describe as the “mystery of filth,” and Leah happily indulged his wishes. Thus, on July 22, Crowley experimented with masochism in a bedroom game wherein Leah became a dominant, menacing tyrant, exclaiming at Crowley:
So low art thou—crawl to my floor-blackened feet, and call them snow-pure marble.… You dog! to your slaves’ task! to your mock Love, you dog! You dirty dog! Do it, you dirty dog! To my soiled feet, lap them …20
While the actions of consenting adults are a private matter, this incident is of biographical interest because it sheds light on his perspective. As Gerald Yorke stated about AC’s sexuality: “Crowley didn’t enjoy his perversions! He performed them to overcome his horror of them.”21 Thus he followed the path of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to deprogram his mind of Victorian mores.22
Sitting in her Bou-Sâada hotel room, Jane Wolfe cursed Crowley’s name. Having left home a month ago, she had still to reach her destination. Complicating matters was a cryptic cable from Palermo:
COMME CEFALU
Nobody could shed light on the missive. She had always said Los Angeles was the modern Athens, and it seemed preferable to the Mediterranean. An actor with the Pathé Motion Picture Company, a French company filming on location in Bou-Sâada, finally provided the translation. “It is in English,” he remarked to her surprise. “It says ‘Come Cefalù.’ ” Thus Jane made her way via Algiers, Tunis, and Sicily to the Hotel des Palmes in Palermo. Directed to a second-floor waiting room, she relaxed with a heavy sigh, closing her eyes and resting her head in her palm. Forty days of delays and itinerary changes since leaving Los Angeles left her exhausted.
Actress Jane Wolfe (1875–1958). (photo cre
dit 14.2)
A man’s high, thin voice pierced the silence. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” She opened her eyes to find AC and Leah in the room with her. In that instant, all their romantic illusions shattered.
Jane’s first thought was “filth personified.” Leah was unwashed and ungroomed, with charcoal-blackened fingers. Crowley, with a striped suit, walking stick, and hat, presented a more wholesome picture, but her clairvoyant sight presented her with a terrifying vision of a bird trapped in mud. Likewise, the actress made a disappointing first impression on Crowley. After months of anticipating the arrival of his “movie star,” he discovered she was older than he anticipated; she was also more masculine, haggard, and unattractive than he had hoped. As he wrote in his diary, “I am like the girl who was to meet a ‘dark distinguished gentleman’ and did, he was a nigger with one eye.”23
Proceeding to the Abbey the next morning, Jane encountered more rude surprises. It was as filthy as its inhabitants. Finding Ninette five months along in her pregnancy with only one man in the Abbey, Jane deduced Crowley was the father. Having come to Cefalù expecting to be Crowley’s lover, she found the job filled twice over … not that she wanted to be his lover, on closer inspection.
As a newcomer to the Abbey, Jane had three days to adjust to the schedule. She stayed for a time in the Whore’s Cell, but ultimately ended up in the Abbey’s second building. Called the Umbilicus, it was the nursery where Ninette stayed, babysitting and cooking. After three days, Crowley put Jane on a rigorous schedule of yogic exercises and had her typing his manuscripts. Despite his constantly belittling her previous visions—particularly her Persian Master named Schmidt—Jane finally understood that Beast was merely breaking down her preconceptions. After a week or so, she relaxed enough for a new task: to help paint the Chamber of Nightmares.
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