Dear Beast,
My first tooth has come out. I am sending it to you. It is Lulette who is writing it. Thank you for my box of candies.
Beast, I love you. Soon I will come to you. Love to you, A.
Lulu P.38
Although he had taken the oath of an Ipsissimus two years earlier (on May 23, 1921), Crowley’s final initiation into the ultimate grade of the AA did not begin until the winter solstice (December 21, 1923); it climaxed in February 1924 and concluded that March. A fox, an Eastern symbol of wisdom, served as his spirit familiar in this initiation; on February 21, it escorted Crowley into the upper realms of Air, through unimaginably huge caverns of ice, and into the lowest Spheres of Fire. As he recorded:
At one period it was necessary for me to ascend from the most tenuous regions of pure air through a series of vast caverns so devised that nothing human could possibly pass through them into the regions of pure fire. To accomplish this it was necessary that I should be exhausted physically to the utmost point compatible with continued life.39
While he left few details on the nature of his ordeal, his letters show that Crowley was sick from nervous prostration and recovering from two operations. He was so ill that, back at the Abbey, Ninette and Arturo performed a sex magick ritual to hasten his recovery. He was also having dark moments of self-doubt. At one point, he asked Mudd, “Have I ever done anything of any value, or am I a mere trifler, existing by a series of shifts of one kind or another. A wastrel, a coward, man of straw?” Amused by the question, Mudd answered by quoting The Book of the Law—“thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that, and no other shall say nay”—to which Crowley responded, “You have probably saved my life.”40 At this time, he also pondered his continuing drug use. “Was the whole of my trouble really due to withdrawal of heroin, and my rapid recovery to cautious restocking?”41 Recognizing that he required the drug medically because of his asthma, he conceded there was also a psychosomatic component to his condition. “My general conclusion on this part of the problem is that drugs are fundamentally useless—and treacherous, the Lord knows! They are just Emergency Rations.… the Asthmatic is in fact a Malade Imaginaire [imaginary invalid] in a certain sense.”42
Regardless, Crowley described his initiation:
At this time he lay sick unto death. He was entirely alone; for They [i.e. the Secret Chiefs] would not even permit the presence of those few whom They had themselves appointed to aid him in this final initiation [Leah, Ninette, Mudd]. In this last ordeal the earthly part of him was dissolved in water; the water was vaporized into air; the air was rarefied utterly, until he was free to make the last effort, and to pass into the vast caverns of the Threshold which guards the Realm of Fire. Now naught human may come through those immensities. So in that Fire he was consumed wholly, and as pure Spirit alone did he return, little by little, during the months that followed, into the body and mind that had perished in that great ordeal of which he can say no more than: I died.43
While the manner in which he was rarefied and destroyed by each of the four elements is indescribable, Crowley recorded its result in his diary:
I am beginning to realize faintly of how many and gross deceits I have been cleansed in my ascent into the Sphere of Fire. In particular, the ‘invincible Love’ which Frater O.P.V. discovered in me is now quite ‘unassuaged of purpose’ and ‘delivered from the lust of result’ flowing forth freely ‘under will’ as it should; now therefore on its waters there shall bloom deathless the Lotus of Purity whereupon Hoor-paar-kraat may stand and glow with Silence.…
Now am I wholly entered within the Sphere of Fire, the Empyrean; and no other shall say nay.
It has been a terrible ordeal.44
But Crowley, in his estimation, survived to become his very own self, the Ipsissimus, looking on the world from the Crown of the Tree of Life.
When Leah and Norman went to attend to their ailing master, she was nervous about meeting Crowley. If his initiation was genuine, the man she loved was no more: as a Magus, he had been the logos, the word Thelema, incorporated in human form as the Beast. As an Ipsissimus, he was now a being of pure spirit, and she was unsure how to approach him. Back in Cefalù, she had done a ritual to prepare herself for this meeting. As she described the rite, “All thoughts fled leaving me with, ‘My whole being calls out to you to see us thro’ this crisis.’ I used this as my opening speech and then the ideas flowed.”45 Gone were her fears of dire consequences for failing the Great Work; gone were her feelings of inferiority, for she was, after all, the Scarlet Woman. For the first time in ages, Leah felt confident and happy.
However, she also brought news that they risked losing the Abbey unless they paid the rent. Thus Crowley called in debts and friendships, even going so far as to contact George Cecil Jones’s representative about obtaining an advance against future payments of the trust fund from his mother’s death. Meanwhile, Leah wrote instructions for Frank Bennett to cable whatever money he had saved for his voyage to the Abbey per Crowley’s earlier summons.
Meanwhile, Crowley, in his mission to rehabilitate his name, wrote An Open Letter to Lord Beaverbrook. It was the desperate gesture of a man who was now too impecunious to travel to London, let alone hire a solicitor. As he remarked bitterly to Holman Hunt—who worked for Crowley’s solicitors Parker, Garrett & Co46—“The Sunday Express made sure that I was penniless before printing its lies.”47 He sent Mudd to take the essay to the Sunday Express and circulate it to London’s literati. Although Mudd was poor and dressed in rags, Crowley felt the apparent ruin of a good man by the Sunday Express would only help their case. Mudd soon wound up living in Chelsea. His room at 27 Redburn Street was uncomfortable, “a poor sort of affair.”48 He was working with Jane Wolfe, who’d been in London since March 1923, and for a time became her lover. When Murray joined them, they sold their clothes to raise money for food and rent.
With money coming in from various sources and the I Ching promising a great change, Crowley and Leah anticipated the end of April. Over the years, May was always a big month: they conceived Poupée in 1919; Crowley’s unborn son was conceived a year later; in 1921, Crowley took his Ipsissimus oath; Collins contracted The Diary of a Drug Fiend in 1922; and in 1923, Italy expelled Crowley. Just as things were looking up, they received a notice of eviction from 50 rue Vavin.
Although in the past Bourcier had allowed Crowley to stay at 50 rue Vavin on credit, he had sold the establishment. The new owner honored no such arrangement; on May 1, he ejected Crowley and Leah from the hotel and kept their luggage in lieu of payment. Crowley angrily cursed the hotel for interfering with the Great Work. Holed up at 6 rue Jolia, they spoke to police and lawyers for several days. By May 8, they had retrieved most of their luggage, and the cursed hotel at 50 rue Vavin soon went bankrupt.
Soon afterward, Crowley met Argentinian artist Xul Solar (1887–1963). Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari was a painter, poet, and visionary known for weaving mystical elements from kabbalah, astrology, tarot, I Ching, and Crowley into his works. His close friend, Argentinian writer Jorgé Luis Borges, called him “our William Blake.”49 Having spent the last dozen years studying modernist art in Europe, Solar was still early in his career when he arrived in Paris on April 29, 1924, to exhibit three pieces at the Musée Galliera as part of a show organized by La Maison de l’Amérique Latine and the Académie Internationale des Beaux-Arts. He also used this opportunity to track down Crowley, whom he had been seeking as a teacher for some time. Solar found him in Chelles on May 14, and the following day Crowley accepted him as a student, noting in his diary, “Xul Solar Signed Oath in Silence Diary.”50 Playing chess with AC later that evening, Solar remarked that “his True Will is to unify South America on Spiritual lines.”51 Solar had read The Equinox and translated Book Four, so Crowley had high hopes that he would produce translations of the Holy Books and help to establish OTO in Argentina. Having tested his astral visions and liked what he saw, AC tasked his new student with recording
astral visions for each of the sixty-four I Ching hexagrams. In a letter to Solar five years later, Crowley reminded him, “By the way, you owe me a complete set of visions for the 64 Yi symbols. Your record as the best seer I ever tested still stands today, and I should like to have a set of visions as a model.”52 Solar eventually did produce these visions as San Signos (Holy Signs), written in his invented language of Neo-criollo; only a few of these visions have ever been published. Solar returned to Buenos Aires shortly after meeting Crowley, becoming prominent among the South American avant garde in the 1920s.53
Early that June, when Crowley apprised Frank Harris of his plans with the Open Letter, Harris advised Crowley to hire a good solicitor. If he agreed to split the profit with his counsel, Harris claimed, Crowley could sue Lord Beaverbrook for libel and receive $20,000 in damages. More than ever, AC felt the need to retaliate.
He hired Herbert Clarke of rue St. Honoré to print three thousand copies of the fifteen-page An Open Letter to Lord Beaverbrook, a document that called for full public investigation of the outrageous attack on one of England’s most prolific contemporary poets. With Jane’s help, Mudd sent copies with cover letters to friends and important people, including members of the House of Lords, Scotland Yard, the British press, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, writer Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), and anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940). In his naive enthusiasm, Mudd even asked the Bureau of Investigation for a letter of recommendation for Crowley’s espionage work during the Great War; the U.S. government, of course, sent no such document.54
Responses to the Open Letter were mixed. Augustus John promised his support, and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote:
I received your letter and one from Dr. Crowley. The latter seems to show that he is in a position to establish the falsehood of the libel … If you can put any wide-read newspaper to print a letter … asserting that the Sunday Express lied on this occasion, it would bring an action against the editor of the newspaper in question. Probably this is strategically the best way to goad the Sunday Express into action. For this purpose, you must find the right editor … I know nothing about Dr. Crowley, but should be glad to see the Beaverbrook press shown up.
Bernard Shaw, knowing nothing of the matter, would not support Crowley. “I replied that no such proposition was ever made,” AC wrote. “He was asked to fight for the decency of public controversy.” Emma Goldman wrote helplessly:
I regret I am too poor to be a help to anybody just now. Neither can I lend my name as support to any undertaking until I myself am on my feet.
Similarly, Philip Heseltine (a.k.a. Peter Warlock, 1894–1930) wrote to Mudd, “I am very sorry to hear that Crowley is at present in such straitened circumstances. I very much regret that, financially at any rate, I can do nothing to help him, being in perhaps as bad a case myself.” Even those with money proved unsupportive. Otto Kahn, for instance, responded simply: “I regret to learn of the situation which Mr. Crowley describes, but as I leave for New York tomorrow morning, I am sorry that it will be impossible for me to see you during my present stay in Europe.” Austin Harrison simply dismissed Crowley as a “moral wreck from the abuse of heroin.” Most discouraging was the reply Mudd received from his father:
Your letter and enclosure reached us last evening and both mother and I are deeply concerned and very despondent about the whole affair. We hope you are quite sure of your facts, for the events referred to seem to relate to the period of your absence from this country when you were thousands of miles away from your hero and therefore not fully cognizant of his doings. If you are relying mainly on his word, I am afraid you are trusting on a very broken reed. You know we never liked him and have not the slightest sympathy with his cause. We have always looked on him as your evil genius right from your Cambridge days, and are terribly afraid that he will blight your whole life.55
In the end, the lukewarm response to the letter and Mudd’s own poverty rendered impotent this plan to salvage Crowley’s name. It was the beginning of the collapse of everything the Thelemites held dear.
Back at Cefalù, Ninette’s sex magick with Arturo resulted in her pregnancy. Announcing it to Leah, she wrote, “I am the prospective mother of a kicking healthy bastard, who should show its sex barring accident during the month of March. I hope this will be a painful shock to no one, in spite of the warning I received once of not to indulge in my natural pastime; I promise to let up a bit after this one.”56
Meanwhile, fearing the Baron would make good on his threats to evict the Thelemites from the Abbey, she and Murray pawned the Abbey’s furniture. They placed Crowley’s books, manuscripts, paintings, and diaries in the care of a Palermo gentleman named Aguel, who began shipping them to Mudd via the American Express Company. After the first box reached London safely, Mudd eagerly requested shipment of the remaining dozen cases, postage due. These Aguel sent aboard the SS Suein Jarl. Alas, His Majesty’s Customs inspected the cases and found some questionable Crowley pieces, including the patently obscene “Leah Sublime,” his “A Book of Photographs,” and thirty-three copies of the homosexual Bagh-i-Muattar. On July 8, Customs sent Mudd a “Notice of seizure of goods prohibited to be imported under Section 42 of the Customs Consolidation Act 1876.” They confiscated all twelve boxes. Mudd received the bad news on July 17 and went into a panic: what would Beast do when he found out? On July 24, his nerves frazzled, Mudd took a rest cure from the Great Work.
When Crowley finally found out, he noted with displeasure, “Some lunatic directly inspired by the High Gods sent all my private papers and books to England! The Customs House has had a continuous spasm of Priapism ever since.”57 Writing to Inspector Draper of Scotland Yard, he claimed his research was clinical, intended for mental pathologists. Customs disagreed. When Leah headed for London to help, she experienced considerable difficulty:
I was refused entrance to England (though I was already seated in the train for London, having passed Customs and Immigrations inspections) for a rat-faced person stage-whispered “Aleister Crowley” to a tall sandy Immigration clerk who asked me to descend myself and accompany him. Not finding A.C. or even C. on my person or in my baggage they announced after 3 hours or more … that they had received telephone orders to send me back.58
In the end—March 1926—Customs would destroy the crates containing Crowley’s confiscated Cefalù diaries, manuscripts, and rare books. This at least is what has been reported in a number of sources. However, the story does not end there. Two years hence Crowley would write to his new disciple, Gerald Yorke, “The trouble about the Cefalù diaries—and all other MSS—is that any day now there may be nothing to edit! … There are 3 cases still unopened and 10 or 11 more still to come from Italy.” And, three weeks thereafter, he would write to this same pupil, “The cases have come (from Italy).” Finally, on Christmas Day of 1928, he wrote to Yorke,
My marginal note was not intended to affirm that any given manuscripts have not been seized. It is in fact probable that duplicates of these diaries were in the cases, but I don’t care in the least about this. What I meant by my note was that these particular manuscripts had not been destroyed.… I am delighted with your report about the Customs. It is deliciously characteristic that they should preserve just those portions which they suppose to be obscene, and destroy the rest. What other portion would they understand?59
While an early shipment of Crowley’s material was seized and destroyed in 1925, it appears a substantial amount survived.
Leah returned to Crowley in Paris after her abortive London trip, and Mudd and Murray soon joined the ailing couple. Finances forced them all to share a room at the Hotel du Maine, with Murray sleeping on the floor. “We are in desperate straits,” Leah reported to Montgomery Evans.60 A day later, Crowley collapsed. “My legs assumed independent control of the situation,” he noted. “I had a very amusing time watching them try to kick the bedstand to pieces.”61 Poverty had placed Crowley in a state of involuntary heroin withdrawal, breaking the ha
bit that his Will merely curtailed.
Mudd and Murray fared no better on their return to London: they often went hungry, and Jane was evicted for not paying her rent. In order to get by, Murray soon began pocketing AA donations sent from American disciples Frater Achad and Max Schneider (of whom more will follow).
One last crisis completed the tragedy: after Leah’s sister Alma visited her and her eccentric lover that August, she proceeded to Cefalù, planning to take Hansi into her custody. Alma Hirsig Bliss (b. 1875) was an artist specializing in miniatures. Loving art from a young age, she attended the Peter-Cooper Institute and spent a year at the Art League. While studying in Paris, she discovered her medium—miniatures—for which she became well known.62 Examples of her works are kept at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.63 Sometime after 1920 she married New Yorker Louis E. Bliss, who died shortly thereafter in June 1923.64 In July 1924 she sailed aboard the SS Minnekahda, arriving in Plymouth, England, on the 12th,65 proceeding from there to visit her sister and the Abbey.
Forewarned, Crowley instructed Ninette, “Should Alma come to Cefalù, she is not to be admitted to the Abbey, or allowed to talk to the children. Don’t parley with her: throw her out quick!” Alma arrived the same day as the letter, but Ninette nevertheless let Alma in. By September 13 she had snuck off with Hansi. She returned to New York via Southampton, arriving with Hansi in October;66 the next year, an illustrated feature on Alma pictured “her adopted child” beside one of him “as he appeared when his home was in Italy.”67
Seeing himself surrounded by misfortune, Crowley, much to Leah’s displeasure, sought a fresh magical current in Dorothy Olsen, a thirty-two-year-old American who had joined the AA that summer in Chelles. Born in Chicago on September 6, 1892, she’d been summering in France, Belgium, England, Spain, Norway, and Italy the last few years.68 When Beast announced that the Secret Chiefs were sending him and “Soror Astrid,” his new Scarlet Woman, on a magical retirement in Tunis—possibly for several months—Leah collapsed. Reluctant to surrender the rank of Scarlet Woman yet powerless to prevent the retirement, Leah convinced herself that she was Babalon incarnate and that Dorothy was her magical child. Two days before the autumnal equinox, Leah entered on one of the scraps of paper that constituted her diary at this time, “I hereby renounce the title the Scarlet Woman and pass it on to the ‘scarlet Concubine of his Desire,’ the daughter of Babalon.”69 Together, they received the equinoctial password “Om.”
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