La Chambre des Cauchemars was Crowley’s name for the main ritual room after decorating it with three grotesque and disturbing murals. Its north wall, dubbed La Nature Malade, depicted hell as “false intellectual and moral consciousness”; it bore scenes such as “Japanese Devil-Boy Insulting Visitors,” “Faithful on the Gallows” and “The Long-Legged Lesbians.” The wall depicting heaven, subtitled “The Equinox of the Gods,” encapsulated the AA teachings and Holy Books with the theme “Aiwass gave Will as a Law to Mankind through the mind of The Beast 666.” The mural of earth, finally, depicted love in terms of the base desires it spawned. “The purpose of these pictures is to enable people, by contemplation, to purify their minds,”24 Crowley wrote. Once unaffected by this lurid sensuality, Crowley believed, the mind was clear of the life-negative taboos and mores of Judeo-Christian culture.
“There, in the corner, are Lesbians as large as life,” Crowley would tell visitors. “Why do you feel shocked and turn away: or perhaps overtly turn to look again? Because, though you may have thought of such things, you have been afraid to face them. Drag all such thoughts into the light … ’tis only your mind that feels any wrong.… Freud endeavors to break down such complexes in order to put the subconscious mind into a bourgeois respectability. That is wrong—the complexes should be broken down to give the sub-conscious will a chance to express itself freely.…”25
Poupée became so sick that Leah took her to the doctor in Palermo on October 8. Although the parents desperately attempted sex magick to cure her, Beast was so grief-stricken that he broke off the operation. On October 11, Poupée went into the hospital. The following day, Crowley passed what he considered his saddest birthday. Waiting and worrying, he returned to Cefalù and tried to lose himself in poetry and painting. It was useless.
On October 14, Leah came home alone. Her heavy sobs said everything. Shattered by grief, Crowley led her into the main temple and pronounced a blessing on Poupée’s soul. In her diary, Leah recorded the tragedy:
A Thelemite doesn’t need to die with a doctor poking at him. He finishes up what he has to do and then dies. That’s what Poupée did. She didn’t pay attention to anything or anybody. Her eyes grew filmy and she died with a grin on her face. Such a wise grin.26
Leah was inconsolable, her grief impenetrable. She would not heed Beast’s advice to rest and began suffering nocturnal pains, followed on October 18 by heavy spotting. Although Beast sent Ninette after a midwife, it was too late. Besides losing her daughter, Leah had miscarried. She was so far along in her pregnancy that they had to call in a surgeon. “I stood as if petrified in the studio while in the next room the surgeon drew forth the dead from the living,” Crowley wrote. Learning that the unborn child would have been a boy, he added, “My brain was benumbed. It was dead except in one part where slowly revolved a senseless wheel of pain.”27 In the end it was Leah, suffering physical and psychological loss, who mustered her remarkable inner strength to urge Beast to persevere in the Great Work despite the tragedy.
When Leah noticed that Ninette, who’d always envied her place beside Beast, experienced an uncomplicated pregnancy, she convinced herself that Ninette had caused her misfortune. On November 3, after another of Leah’s tirades, Beast humored her and skimmed through Ninette’s diary. (At the Abbey, all residents made their magical records available to Beast for perusal and comment.) What he read made him feel physically ill. Her diary’s hostility and jealousy convinced him that Ninette’s negativity had indeed claimed the lives of both infants. He entered the temple and exorcized the shadow. Banishment was the only solution, so he left a note for Beauty:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Initiation purges. There is excreted a stench and a pestilence. In your case two have been killed outright, and the rest made ill. There are signs that the process may lead to purification and things made safe within a short time. But we cannot risk further damage; if the hate is still in course, it had better coil back on its source. Keep your diary going carefully. Go and live in Cefalù alone; go to the hospital alone; the day before you come out send up your diary, and I will reconsider things. I shall hope to see the ulcers healing. Do not answer this; simply do as I say.
Love is the law, love under will.
66628
On November 5, Ninette left the Abbey and went into Palermo to have her baby. She gave birth on Friday, November 26, to a daughter, whom Crowley named Astarte Lulu Panthea; he readmitted Shummy to the Abbey.
C. F. Russell arrived at the Abbey on November 21, full of stories of his exploits of the last two years: how, as a Pharmacist Mate First Class aboard the USS Reina Mercedes in Annapolis, he injected forty grains of cocaine on November 24, 1918, as a magical experiment, resulting in his December 12 discharge;29 how he made his way to Detroit in May 1919 and helped with the Great Work there; and how he applied for a passport on October 11, 1920—with Ryerson vouching for him—so he could come to Italy for study.30 His sailor’s coarseness estranged him from the residents, prompting Beast to describe him as “a husk of 100% American vulgarity which conceals a Great Adept.”31 Jane Wolfe was not so kind:
From the way Russell has done the odd jobs around here, I am bound to say he either lacks intelligence, lives in another world entirely … or does not care especially how a thing is done.32
Crowley nevertheless saw his potential. Shortly after arriving at the Abbey, he became a Probationer in the AA as Frater Genesthai, and Beast prepared to conduct, with him and Leah, the first major magical operation since 1918’s Amalantrah Working.
The Cephaloedium Working had three goals: to inspire Crowley to finish writing a commentary on The Book of the Law; to invoke Hermes and Apollo; and to obtain true understanding of the tarot trump “The Tower.” The participants included Leah, who ceremonially wore a scarlet Abbai girt with a sword; Russell, who wore a black robe with a gold lining; and Crowley, who wore orange and bore a Janus-headed wand entwined with four serpents. They began with a banquet of fish and yellow wine, then, after appropriate banishings, purifications and consecrations, took an oath:
Hear all that we, To Mega Therion 9°=2D AA The Beast; Alostrael, The Scarlet Woman; and Genesthai 0°=0° AA do now in The Presence of TAHUTI most solemnly swear to devote ourselves to the Establishment of The Book of the Law as authored by Aiwaz 93 to 666 by the Way of the Cephaloedium Working as in the record thereof it hath been written.
After invoking the gods by song and dance in the tradition of the Paris Working, AC and Leah disrobed and got Russell high on ether. Their intent was to coax him to make love to Crowley, who would thereafter make love to Leah; scryings and prophecies would follow thereafter. Unfortunately, the plan failed. As Russell recalled,
Your Circean enchantment didn’t give me a bone-on—add that Ethyl Ether is no aphrodisiac—you were in bed between me and the Virgin (sic) Guardian of the Sangraal who had to lean over you to do what she did and you played down in the Record—in fact more than merely to shake the hand of a stranger faire gonfler son andouille.33
The working ultimately ended on a sour note, Beast deeming it a failure on January 20, 1921.
With the unhappy end of the Cephaloedium Working, Beast and Leah traveled to Palermo. With a vow to “give the body to whoever should desire it,”34 the lovers parted, AC heading to Paris to recruit new students while Leah stayed in town with their landlord, Baron Carlo la Calce. Monsieur Bourcier again let Crowley stay on credit in his Hôtel de Blois at 50 rue Vavin. Nina Hamnett, who saw Crowley regularly at this time, found him despondent and miserable, shattered by Poupée’s death. After passing the hospital where Poupée had been born, he retreated to the forest of Fontainebleau, a place that had always been special to him, and broke down sobbing.
Hamnett introduced Crowley to budding writer and poet Mary Francis Butts (1890–1937), who contributed to The Little Review and The Transatlantic Review. One might call her literary and artistic interests hereditary: her grandfather, Thomas Butts, had b
een a patron of poet, artist, and Gnostic Catholic Saint William Blake (1757–1827).35 Her father, likewise, befriended several pre-Raphaelite artists. Butts and Crowley shared a lot in common: Mary was very close to her father, who died in 1904 when she was thirteen. Like Crowley, she lived on a small annuity from her inheritance but tended to over-spend. Also like Crowley, she attended college (from 1909 to 1912) without completing a degree. After a string of lesbian relationships during the war years, Butts married Jewish writer and publisher John Rodker (1894–1955) in 1918, and had a child in November 1920. She had a serious and long-standing interest in the occult and had even spent time the previous year studying Éliphas Lévi’s works at the British Museum. Fair and winnowy, her beaming blue eyes, fiery red hair, and boundless energy nevertheless made her seem immense. Of her, Crowley later wrote, “My relations with her were never very intimate. We enjoyed exchanging views.”36
When she met Crowley in 1921 she was in the process of separating from her husband and forging an emotional and spiritual bond with writer James Alexander Cecil Maitland (d. 1926). Maitland was “a lovable but dilapidated Scotch ‘aristocrat’ ”37 whose grandfather worked on the Revised Version of the Bible, and whose father was a Catholic clergyman. Interested in magic and the occult from an early age, he was known to draw chalk circles on the floor of his Belsize Park apartment and attempt various conjurations. Butts and Maitland had, the previous year, ritually bonded by cutting crosses on each other’s wrists, sucking and kissing the other’s wound.
Crowley instructed them both in basic techniques of magic, meditation, and yoga, and conducted several experiments with them in astral projection. Butts excelled at the latter, referring to herself as a “secular Isis.” Butts’s journals from this period include long entries detailing her magical practices, astral visions, and spiritual meditations. On March 11 she took her I° initiation into OTO,38 and on the 18th Crowley taught her the “gnostic cross.”39 She approached Crowley with caution, noting “Aleister is an assistance, not a good or an evil. It is a good practice to notice a phenomena and its antithesis.… In that case it depended which way you looked.”40 However, she would later write of Crowley, “I believe the Beast to be a technical expert of the highest order.”41 Her impressions of Thelema were likewise favorable, noting in her diary, “I believe in ‘Do what thou wilt’ etc.”42
When Crowley invited the couple to stay at the Abbey, they hesitated at first. As Butts noted in her journal, “Aleister Crowley must know by now that we are playing for time with regard to Cefalù, i.e., that we won’t come to him unless driven there by poverty or are reassured as to his intentions.”43 Whatever their reservations, they were evidently assuaged, as Butts and Maitland would arrive that summer for a stay at the Abbey.
Hamnett also introduced Crowley to John Wilson Navin Sullivan (1886–1937), former mathematical and scientific reviewer for the London Times and Athenaeum. His friend Aldous Huxley described him as having “a very clear, hard, acute intelligence, and a very considerable knowledge, not merely on his own subjects—mathematics, physics and astronomy—but on literature and music. A stimulating companion.”44 Educated at University College, London, he had broad interests in science, mathematics, literature, and music, and contributed articles to newspapers and periodicals. He even wrote a novel, An Attempt at Life.45 In the years to follow, Sullivan would establish himself as one of the foremost popularizers of science, combining his love of mathematics, physics, philosophy, and music into classic books like Aspects of Science, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, and The Limitations of Science.46 He was one of the few people in Britain to understand the theory of relativity when it was first introduced, and when Einstein visited the University of London, Sullivan was the only journalist able to discuss it in Einstein’s native German.47 His interest in the intersection of science and aesthetics made him a natural foil for Crowley’s thinking; the following quote from Aspects of Science easily could have flowed from AC’s own pen:
Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.48
They spent long nights playing chess and discussing mathematics. Sullivan had no interest in the occult49 but, when he responded to Beast’s discussions of The Book of the Law by seeing numerical theorems in its passages, Crowley excitedly invited him to the Abbey to write a mathematical proof of Liber AL.
Sullivan’s wife, (Violet) Sylvia Mannooch (b. 1896),50 was a beautiful, tragic figure trapped in an unhappy marriage. They shared only a love of music, and Sullivan’s preoccupation with mathematics much eroded even this. Both realized their relationship was pointless. When Sullivan vowed to AC to find his true will, Sylvia became a greater hindrance. Crowley recalled, “He asked me point-blank to take her off his hands for a time.”51 Crowley agreed and told him, “You can have her back whenever you like by whistling for her.” It was a replay of his affair with Ratan Devi at the behest of her husband.
As in the original liaison, Sylvia became pregnant. She and Beast planned to return to Cefalù, where Sullivan would meet them and write his precis on Liber AL. Sullivan, however, met them at the dock during lunch and demanded, “I want Sylvia back.”
“Righto!” Crowley nodded his head, stuffing food in his mouth and swallowing. “I’ll have to get the cabin changed and take a few of Sylvia’s things out of my trunk.”52 The scene was a perfect picture of irony, with Crowley agreeable, Sylvia enraged, and Sullivan flabbergasted. In the end, Crowley returned to Cefalù alone. Sylvia would die of typhoid shortly thereafter.53
Over the years, the relationship between Fratres Merlin Peregrinus and Baphomet had grown strained: Crowley had lost respect for the head of OTO, finding Reuss’s experience in the IX° to be unsatisfactory and nearly nonexistent. As AC wrote of Reuss, “He told me that he had applied it with success but twice in his whole life.”54 Likewise, Reuss’s own doubts about Crowley resulted in bitter correspondence wherein he denounced The Book of the Law; however, when he visited Beast in Palermo, it was on civil terms. No record survives of this summit. However, when Reuss suffered a stroke shortly thereafter, Crowley claimed to have been named his successor as Outer Head of the Order, pending election by all the world heads. Four years would pass before the appointment was ratified.
Beast returned to the Abbey on April 6, where the following two months passed in miserable dullness. Although he concluded this signified the end of a magical cycle—and the I Ching confirmed this—he was unsure what to do next. Everyone, it seemed, was poor, depressed, and ill. Around May 20, as the sun entered the sign of Gemini, he and Leah conducted an operation of sex magick designed to release within her the power of Babalon. Although, in Leah’s mind, the ritual transformed her from simply being a Scarlet Woman, consort to the Beast, into Babalon herself, for Crowley the lull continued.
Then, on May 23, another inspiration seized Crowley. Sitting at his desk, he knew it was time to take the most awful obligation possible. He scribbled in his diary, “I am mortally afraid to do so. I fear I might be called upon to do some insane act to prove my power to act without attachment.” Then, at 9:34 p.m., his mind became calm. “As God goes, I go,” he told himself. Discarding his clothes, he entered the temple with Leah at his side. There, before his Scarlet Woman and all the powers of the universe as his witness, Crowley took the Oath of an Ipsissimus, (10°=1°), the final grade in the AA hierarchy. The oath began his final and greatest initiation, one that would not see its conclusion until 1924. In his diary, he wrote:
I am by insight and initiation an Ipsissimus; I’ll face the phantom of myself, and tell it so to its teeth. I will invoke Insanity itself, but having thought the Truth, I will not flinch from fixing it in word and deed, whatever come of it.
Along with the grade came the obligation never to advertise its attainment. T
his vow Crowley kept his entire life, the only hint of his attainment appearing in Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), where, among a catalog of his attainments up to the grade of Magus, he wrote that his holy guardian angel “wrought also in me a Work of Wonder beyond this, but in this matter I am sworn to hold my peace.”55
By 10:05 p.m., Crowley was back at his desk.
Having had enough of Jane’s obstinate preconceptions and asinine visions, Beast decided she needed a magical retirement. It would span a month and involve six daily meditations: in the first week, these would each last thirty minutes; in the second week, the meditations would be an hour long; by the fourth week, she would be meditating twelve hours a day. Wolfe reacted poorly, however, when Crowley instructed her to go to the top of the rock of Cephaloedium for a month. “You’re crazy,” she told him.
“A boat leaves for Palermo in the morning,” he replied calmly but firmly, pointing to the open door of the Whore’s Cell. “There’s the door.”
When she grudgingly agreed to the retirement and Crowley told her she could take nothing with her—no books, games, visitors or other distractions—she objected again. “What am I supposed to do?”
Beast smiled sagaciously. “You will have the sun, moon, stars, sky, sea, and universe to read and play with.”
Unconvinced, she nevertheless began her retirement on June 13 on a secluded part of the beach designated by Crowley. Russell transported and pitched AC’s Himalayan tent, which she regarded disparagingly because the wardrobe trunk she brought to Cefalù was nearly the same size. Beginning the retirement, she vowed not to speak, except to reply “Love is the law, love under will” when Russell brought her meals—typically grapes, a loaf of bread, and a jug of water. Emotions washed over her that first day: she was nervous lest nothing happen. She missed the niceties of her Hollywood life and resented the rocks beneath her that made her bed and floor uncomfortable. Although angry at Crowley, she nevertheless determined to succeed.
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