Jane awoke the next morning feeling as if the ground beneath her was rocking and swaying. Looking out the door, she found the tent surrounded by the water of the high tide. Fortunately, Crowley and Russell had appeared to check on her and moved the tent back to dry ground. After that, her retirement proceeded as scheduled. Although she grew calm, boredom persisted. To amuse herself between meditations, she exercised and swam naked in the water. Finally, after nineteen days of solitude, her thoughts dissolved into “perfect calm, deep joy, renewal of strength of courage.”56 Looking about, she understood what Crowley meant about the world being her toy. She had found both herself and a fulfilling spirituality.
At the end of the retirement, Jane returned to the Abbey looking better than ever. Not only had her disposition changed, but the exercise and diet trimmed off sixteen pounds.
Mary Butts and Cecil Maitland arrived at the Abbey on July 5, 1921, and were enchanted by the summer weather and setting. Butts arrived having recently outlined her objectives in studying magick:
I. I want to study and enjoy, and to enter if I can into the fairy world, the mythological world, and the world of the good ghost story.
II. I want by various mystical practices and studies to produce my true nature, and enlarge my perceptions.
III. I don’t only want to find my true will. I want to do it. So I want to learn how to form a magical link between myself and the phenomena I am interested in. I want power.
IV. I want to find out what is the essence of religion, study the various ideas of God under their images.
V. I want to make this world into material for the art of writing.
VI. I want to observe the pairs of opposites, remembering that which is below is as that which is above. From this I wish to formulate clearly, the hitherto incommunicable idea of a third perception. This is a perception of the nature of the universe as yet unknown to man, except by intuitions which cannot be retained, and by symbols whose meaning cannot be retained also. I want to fix it in man’s mind.
VII. I want to write a book not about an early theocracy and fall of man, … but a book written about the subject, historically, under terms of human fallibility without deification of Pythagoras or the writers of the Kabala.… A book to show the relation of art to magic, and shew the artist as the true, because the oblique adept.57
In Thelemic parlance, it was her Will to be a writer, and she looked to magick to give her both discipline and subject matter for writing. Thus, while staying at the Abbey, she worked on editing her novel Ashe of Rings (1925).58 However, writing was but one of her activities. There were, of course, the Abbey’s mandated activities and lectures. But she also continued her experiments with astral projection and studied Crowley’s unpublished works. These included Liber Aleph, his commentary on The Book of the Law, and the third part of Book Four which would later become Magick in Theory and Practice. As she read Magick, Butts made a number of recommendations on the content and additional topics for the Master Therion to cover. In his Confessions, Crowley acknowledged his debt to her:
I practically re-wrote the third part of Book Four. I showed the manuscripts to Soror Rhodon (Mary Butts) and asked her to criticize it thoroughly. I am extremely grateful to her for her help, especially in indicating a large number of subjects which I had not discussed. At her suggestion, I wrote essay upon essay to cover every phase of the subject. The result has been the expansion of the manuscript into a vast volume, a complete treatise upon the theory and practice of Magick, without any omissions.59
Judging from her Cefalù diaries, Butts struggled with many aspects of life at the Abbey, her record punctuated by flashes of anger, disappointment, and doubt. She complained about the rationing of cigarettes, infrequent structured teaching, uninhibited sexuality (even in the presence of children), and the fact that “both [Hirsig and Crowley] dope out of all reasonable proportion.” Privately, she also speculated that Poupée had died because Leah had neglected her.60 Even while helping with Magick in Theory and Practice, she records a remark by Cecil Maitland regarding the high esteem in which the Thelemites regarded Crowley: “it makes AC tragic, because he is a kind, wise, honourable, gentle man crucified by his utter belief in his own teaching.”61 Nevertheless, she continued her magical work throughout, and offered suggestions on how to make the Abbey more inviting to other visitors.62
Reading Herodotus’ account of an Egyptian priestess copulating with a goat in the course of a religious ceremony, Crowley pondered the occult significance of these “prodigies.” The unions of humans and animals was certainly sacred to ancient cultures: the Egyptians venerated gods who had human bodies and animals’ heads. Similar ideas appeared in Greek mythology, with the bull-headed Minotaur and the story of Leda and the swan. Other ancient religions around the world told similar tales. Thus Crowley suggested such a working. Leah agreed to act as priestess. They got a goat, and the Scarlet Woman knelt naked on the ground, presenting herself to the indifferent beast. Crowley tried coaxing the goat to mount Leah, but the animal failed to respond to a human female. To save the ritual from utter failure, Crowley took the goat’s place with Leah, as he recorded in his diary: “I atoned for the young He-goat at considerable length.”63
On September 14, as their visit drew to a close, both Butts and Maitland signed AA Probationers’ oaths. Oddly enough, they left for Paris two days later. Back in London, Butts continued her magical work and struggled with her ambivalence, writing, “ ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ That is all right. But people are to be made aware of this by fear, coercion, bribery, etc., a religious movement re-enacted. The founder is to be Crowley and his gulled, doped women.”64 In the end, she concluded the Abbey was a sham. “I’d sooner be the writer I am capable of becoming than an illuminated adept, magician, magus, master of this temple or another.”65
When Jane returned to the Abbey from her retirement, all were abuzz anticipating the arrival of Frank Bennett, VII°, Beast’s man from Australia. He was a senior member in Crowley’s circle, both in terms of his fifty-five years of age and his eleven years in the AA, and his visit posed a logistic puzzle: there was no room for him in the Whore’s Cell, and the Umbilicus, as a nursery, was inappropriate for such an August Brother. Crowley asked Russell to give up his room for Bennett. The student refused, complaining that he needed to study and meditate. Jane, seeing Crowley bristle, quickly offered her room. At this point, however, the matter of a room was no longer the point. So the student sulked and the master stewed, until Beast grabbed a towel and told Russell sharply, “Your work doesn’t matter a tinker’s cuss. You’d better be out by the time I finish my bath.” However, he returned from the beach to find Russell still entrenched in the room. AC ultimately confronted him with the tack that had been so successful with Jane: he said he worried that Russell was working too hard and suggested he take a holiday from the Abbey for his own health.
The student feared this meant banishment, so on July 18, the day after Bennett arrived, he climbed the rock of Cephaloedium and began a magical retirement. Cleaning his makeshift hut, he kept his mind active by counting the 273 handfuls of dirt and 219 small stones that he threw out. Then he brought in a stone slab to serve as an altar for the Thelemic Holy Books, a copy of the Stele of Revealing, his magical knife, and the Greek Zodiacal cross that Frater Achad had made for him. Then, at 8 p.m., he did the Lesser Banishing Ritual and resolved not to descend the rock for food or water for eight days. Less than an hour later, he began acting like a Master of the Temple, interpreting every event as a particular dealing of God with his soul. Waking early the next morning, he proceeded with solar adorations and recitations of the Holy Books.
Ninette, who considered Russell a child requiring gentle treatment, begged Beast to intervene. He simply shrugged his shoulders, “Let him come down. He’s up there by no will of mine.” Crowley thought Russell had lost his mind. “He has no sense of proportion, and so mixes the planes that he attaches real importance to the number of ha
ndfuls of dirt he finds in his hovel.”66 Ninette, however, carried a rucksack of food and water up the rock. While Russell would neither talk nor eat, he was grateful for the water. On July 24, after a week on the rock, Russell descended shortly after noon and slept on the nursery’s living room floor.67
As Crowley told the end of the story, the sound of his name being shouted hoarsely awakened Beast from his lunchtime nap. He opened his eyes just in time to see Russell, unshaven and bedraggled, drop a rucksack at his feet and run off whooping. He had supposedly visited the barber for a shave but, after being lathered, remembered his oath not to descend the rock for water and dashed out of the shop, shaving cream flying in all directions. When Crowley opened Russell’s rucksack, he found it full of incoherent diaries and concluded Russell had lost his mind.
Frank Bennett’s spiritual awakening occurred during a walk on the beach with Leah and Beast. The morning was cloudless and still, the sea a clear indigo. Although a poor swimmer, Bennett joined the other two in the water and afterward sat naked with them in the shade, admiring the scenery. “Progradior,” Beast launched into a lecture, “I want to explain to you fully, and in a few words, what initiation means, what is meant when we talk of the Real Self, and what the Real Self is.” In speaking, he equated the holy guardian angel with the subconscious mind: illumination began when one let it work without interference from the conscious mind, for the conscious mind repressed impulses of the subconscious, resulting in restriction and evil. “There is no sin but Restriction,” The Book of the Law said, and it applied here. The most ubiquitous urge, which was constantly repressed to the detriment to our mental and physical health—and Freud concurred with this—was sex. Rather than treat it as an unfortunate and shameful accident of nature, AC saw it as a basic part of himself, not only physically but as a symbol of God’s ability to create.
This was news to Bennett, who thought the holy guardian angel was super-conscious. If Crowley was right, then all he had to do was listen to his subconscious. That was one meaning of “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” The revelation made his head reel. He next had a wild impulse. Rather than ignore it, he gave in. Bennett ran down the beach and jumped into the water, joined shortly thereafter by Leah and Crowley. After the swim, Bennett excitedly asked Beast, “Please tell me again what you said just now.”
“How the devil should I remember?” he asked, but with Bennett’s reminders, he reconstructed the discussion as best he could. Bennett smiled with satisfaction. “You have given me the key to the inmost treasury of my soul.”
Returning to the Abbey, he pondered his illumination, musing, “I wish I knew this before. It would have saved me a lot of misery.” Going to bed at eleven that night, the churning in his mind kept him awake, and his head throbbed painfully with a pressure within, threatening to split. Suffering for four hours, suffocating, he rose from his sweat-soaked bed, threw open his window, and pressed his hands to his head to ease the pain. Then, palms to temples, Bennett dashed out into the night, gasping for air like a drowning man. Finally, a voice deep within instructed, “Breathe deep.” When he did, his body relaxed. He felt the sweat coating his skin, the stones and thorns pressing into his feet. The pain dissolved, and the pressure folded upon itself. Bennett returned to the Abbey thirty minutes after leaving and quickly fell asleep. “Absolute blackness pervaded my whole being,” he recorded in his journal.
Bennett stayed in his room the next day and went to bed early. His claustrophobia returned that evening, but one thought penetrated the chaos in his brain. Bennett grabbed a piece of paper and desperately scribbled it down.
What fools we men are! We make for ourselves a prison, and erect mirrors that cover all the four walls of this prison; and not being satisfied with this, we cover the ceiling with a mirror as well. And these are our five senses which reflect themselves in hundreds of forms until we are so befogged that we believe that these reflections of ourselves—of man as Man and Bull—are all that is. But there are a few who have examined these mirrors and polished them, and discovered that the more the mirrors are polished the less reflection they give. Then a time has come when they have found that they are not mirrors at all, but only veils, and that one can see through the veils.68
Thus he understood that one could find one’s holy guardian angel.
On the third night of his trance, Bennett’s mind remained placid. He felt no pain or discomfort, and he understood Thelema better. In his diary he recorded what, in his mind, was conclusive proof of the Law’s importance: “Our Father, which art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom Come, Thy WILL be done …” Frank Bennett understood.
Frater Progradior, Frank Bennett (1868–1930). (photo credit 14.3)
As 1921 drew to a close, the Abbey’s visitors returned to their homes. Butts and Maitland’s appearance reputedly shocked their Parisian friends, with Nina Hamnett describing them looking “like two ghosts and were hardly recognizable.”69 Goldring’s description of them in 1925, from South Lodge, shows no sign of the health-wrecked drug fiends he claimed the Abbey made of them; Butts would live on for another fifteen years, while Maitland would commit suicide in 1926, the year after he and Butts parted company.
Frank Bennett, meanwhile, advanced to the AA grade of Adeptus Major (6°=5°) and the OTO grade of IX° during his stay. Beast gave him a X° charter as head of the Australian OTO on October 5, and, in November, Bennett returned to Australia to set up branches of OTO and AA.
The year 1922 began with a visit from Ninette’s two sisters. Her twin, Mimi, thought Crowley impressive, while Helen Fraux found him loathsome. When Beast threw out the latter sister for trying to poison the children’s minds, she went to the Palermo police with all sorts of wild stories. A resulting visit and search of the Abbey by the sotto-prefetto turned up nothing to validate her complaints. Shortly thereafter, Russell married Mimi and prepared to leave. Beast asked if he would visit Australia and help Bennett set up the order there. This he did, the cocky sailor finding Bennett “puffed up like a frog with the importance of his recently gained grade of Adeptus Major in the AA and IX° in the OTO.”70 Without a meeting of the minds, they simply traded copies of Crowley manuscripts and parted. Russell arrived back in the United States on January 28, 1922;71 years later, he would found his own Crowley-derived magical organizations, the Choronzon Club and GBG.
Winter rolled in damp and cold, and brought with it the first snow in Cefalù’s history. The unheated villa was miserable, driving Crowley and Leah, dispirited and impoverished, back to Paris that February while Jane, back at the Abbey, sold Crowley’s liquor for spare change. AC again called on the Bourciers at 50 rue Vavin, where they stayed on credit. Unable to muster any enthusiasm, his attempts to recruit new students found no takers. “For the first time in my life, Paris disappointed me,” Crowley wrote.72
On February 14, Crowley left Paris and returned to Fontainebleau (while Leah returned to London). Here he stayed at Au Cadran Bleu, near the hospital where Poupée had been born, and again confronted the painful memories of his recent losses:
I was so happy and hopeful here two years ago; and now my little Poupée has been dead over a year and her little brother never came to birth; and my manhood is in part crushed.73
Two years before, he had first been searching for an Abbey. Now he was broken in spirit and wallet. Furthermore, he was facing the ugly truth about himself: despite his philosophy about drug use, he had become addicted to heroin.
Crowley decided to break his drug habit, setting up a progressive method of weaning himself: each day there was a time he called “Open Season,” when he could take as much heroin or cocaine as he wanted. “Closed Season” was the remaining part of the day when drug use was prohibited. His goal was to reduce gradually the length of Open Season until Closed Season was twenty-four hours. He also planned to reduce his heroin intake during Open Season. He began on February 15. He had taken no drug since 8 the previous evening, and only one dose that morning. By
4 o’clock that afternoon, he encountered the Storm Fiend, his name for withdrawal: “The acute symptoms arise suddenly, usually on waking up from a nap. They remind me of the ‘For God’s sake turn it off’ feeling of having an electric current passing through one.”74 Despite taking a 2 milligram dose of strychnine to help fight withdrawal and eating to reduce his craving, his withdrawal ran the classic course: mucous lined his throat, and the bronchitis that first drove him to heroin use reappeared. He felt emotionally blunt and indifferent. Throughout, Crowley recorded his rationalizations for taking the drug: “A small dose—to show my indifference to these considerations”; “Simply because I feel rotten”; “I felt no craving today, but … I had so much expectation that I took 3 small doses.”75
While cocaine proved easier to quit, his heroin need persisted. And although he failed to stop heroin altogether, he did substantially reduce his intake. On March 20 he recorded his “triumph over temporal trials.”76 He was kidding himself in the way any addict rationalizes his or her behavior. Drug addiction would continue to weigh heavily on Crowley’s mind. Over two years later, he would write to Norman Mudd,
I have thought the matter over very thoroughly in the last few weeks, and can give you (at last) a considered judgement.
1 I have never maintained that any man could stop at any time under any condition.
2 Favorable conditions are that a man should a) will to stop, b) know his True Will, c) be able to take steps to carry it out, d) be free from physically depressing stress.
Perdurabo Page 54