Dorothy Olsen (b. 1892). (photo credit 16.3)
That day, Crowley and Dorothy sailed for the Majestic Hotel, Tunis. There they began “a magical operation of the very highest class”70 in which Crowley wrote “To Man,” otherwise known as “The Mediterranean Manifesto”:
TO MAN
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
My Term of Office upon the Earth being come in the year of the foundation of the Theosophical Society, I took upon myself, in my turn, the sin of the whole World, that the Prophecies might be fulfilled, so that Mankind may take the Next Step from the Magical Formula of Osiris to that of Horus.
And mine Hour being now upon me, I proclaim my Law.
The Word of the Law is . [Thelema]
Given in the midst of the Mediterranean Sea
An XX Sol in 3 Libra die Jovis
by me [To Mega Therion]
[Logos of the Aeon of Thelema]
Crowley printed this broadsheet to distribute as the new World Teacher, hoping to use the TS’s announcement of a coming messiah to fuel his own work.
Back in Paris, the day after Crowley left with Dorothy, Leah prepared to die. Her Big Lion had run off with another woman. She had given up her crown as Scarlet Woman. She was sick, and, furthermore, she was sick of being sick. As a Thelemite, she not only awaited death but felt it was her Will to die. Like Poupée, she had finished her job and desired to move on.
On September 24, she wrote her will, leaving her possessions to Mudd, with a few exceptions: to Jane, the bravest woman she knew, Leah left her blue cape; to Ninette, she left custody of Hansi; and her little red purse went to Lulette. She also left instructions for Mudd “to prosecute the swine who are responsible for my death,” namely Lord Beaverbrook, Alma Bliss, and H. Roy (the latest landlord to seize Crowley’s things for nonpayment of rent). The next day she telegrammed news of her impending death to her good friend Aimée Gouraud, who rushed to her side with food and reassurances. Despite her despair, Leah stressed, particularly to Aimée, that she did not blame Crowley:
Understand that you are not to think that A.C. deserted me. He did not. He liberated me. I die, not as you imagine through neglect by him but in service to the Work which we united to do. He and I are One, nay are None.
When you see him you will understand.71
On September 26, still convinced she was dying, Leah wrote a tender au revoir to the man to whom she was hopelessly devoted:
My beloved Beast,
93.
I am going to die tonight. There is very little I can say for now that the conspiracy of Silence is at an end, your monkey takes on the silence.
I have always loved you, as you have me. That is why you have never failed me as I have never failed you. We have both misunderstood often but we always found that misunderstanding did not matter for it lead to understanding in our case, always at the right time. Only gods know what time means.
You will not grieve over my death. You will rejoice, God that you are. Remember that Alostrael, Babalon … the Scarlet Woman, lives forever. Leah Hirsig died but then I never knew her …
I am yours, you are mine
93 93/93
Babalon72
Her only regret was that the Beast was so far away while she was on her death bed. On September 28, she wrote in her diary:
I should have liked, as a human creature, to have died in the arms of The Beast 666, who, as will be noted in my very first diary (commencing Mar 21, 1919) was and is my lover, my mate, my father, my child and everything else that Woman needs in Man.73
Unable to pay rent, she lost her room, wandering rain-drenched Paris and finally collapsing in the hallway of her hotel as onlookers speculated whether she was ill or merely drugged; a jeering crowd gathered until the police arrived.
Death was all that remained for her. She felt she had fulfilled the prophecy of The Book of the Law, which warned that the Scarlet Woman would be “cast out from men: as a shrinking and despised harlot shall she crawl through dusk wet streets, and die cold and an-hungered.”74 She hoped to die on a Monday because in that same scripture, it is written “he is ever a sun, and she a moon.”75 When Monday, September 29, came, she did not die; however, a telegram from Ninette devastated her with news that Alma Bliss, with help from the American consul in Palermo, had fled to America with Hansi. “Alma Bliss,” Leah complained, “has communicated with both the governess and myself as though she had done a wonderful deed. She is quite crazy.”76
The next day, Mudd, having given up in his campaign with the Open Letter, joined her in Paris. Good old Mudd, she thought: he’s always there when you need him. On October 3, she placed the Seal of Babalon on his penis; two days later, they celebrated their informal Thelemic wedding, feasting on tea, bread, ham, grapes, and figs. They consummated the marriage on October 7 with an act of sex magick.
“Who is your best girl?” Leah asked as they made love.
“You,” he replied.
“What is thy will?”
He recalled the purpose of this act. “To help establish the Law of Thelema.”
“Who are you?” she asked pointedly.
“Omnia Pro Veritate.” This answer disappointed Leah. When next they made love, Leah described it in her diary: “With a man who does not know who he is but is commonly called Norman Mudd.”77
Mudd soon returned to London, unable to scrounge up any further money or arrive at any other means of support. On November 19 he signed himself into the Metropolitan Asylums Board home for the homeless poor. He gave his age as thirty-five and his occupation as literary agent.
Leah, meanwhile, remained in France, finding temporary work washing dishes, peeling potatoes, and carrying coals in a Montparnasse restaurant for thirteen hours a day, waiting for Beast and Astrid to pay her passage to Tunis.
By now, the Abbey was practically empty, Ninette having given all but two large cases to Aguel. Only Ninette, Arturo, and the children remained; and the four young ones—with a fifth on the way—kept her busy. Mimi was eighteen months old, and when she wasn’t wandering off and making her mother look for her, her upset stomach kept her constantly screeching as if she was being skinned alive. This racket put the other kids on edge, Lulu often hiding in the Umbilicus for peace.
Although Crowley constantly sent as much money as he could to the Abbey, finances were worse than ever. They had neither coffee nor red meat, and only the kind heart of the milkman kept milk coming. She was again behind on the rent, and la Calce threatened to evict her January 1. Desperate, she tried selling Raoul’s shoes to raise money for the milkman or to buy coal.
Arturo, who had by now left home and moved into the Abbey, did his best to help; however, his pension came irregularly, and boils on his thumb and foot made it difficult for him to work. At one point they quarreled so bitterly about money that Ninette finally threw him out.
After ten days, Arturo returned penitently with fresh bread, kerosene, coffee, tea, and sugar. He had played his last six cents on a lottery, won, and spent it on her. “Santa Claus never was so thoughtful,” she bubbled to Leah:
God, what good these little things did me. That was a change, and my spirits bounced up like a balloon, and the boy did enjoy our delight.… Dear me, Lala, do you know what that coffee and French bread tasted like? Months without coffee. This insipid bread and milk has become intolerable. I drank it with as reverent a feeling as if it had been ambrosia sent down by the Gods.… Perhaps I am crazy, Lala, but I feel happy.78
The man she loved, and the woman she once loathed as her fiercest competitor, she missed dearly. “I need but one satisfaction,” she wrote again, “i.e., a little Lala to laugh out loud with, and to swap stories about the last eight months. When will we see you again? … Don’t write such beautifully neat, good-looking pages next time you write, Lala, but be sociable and fill every bit of your paper with nonsense. Chat if you have no special anxiety on your mind.”79
Crowley returned to Tunis from his dese
rt trek with Dorothy Olsen late in December 1924, three months after it began, finding his business in limbo. Jane had stopped typing the Hag while she took a rest cure for colitis, placing Crowley’s autobiography on indefinite hold. AC wrote to Mudd emphasizing practicality: “We are now doing our best to pick up the pieces. You must not expect everything at once and you must forget about Magick altogether.”80
Shortly thereafter, an intense trance engulfed Crowley, who recorded his vision, incorporating “To Man,” in The Heart of the Master.81
When Dorothy became pregnant, Crowley summoned Leah to assist in her convalescence. The former Scarlet Woman—herself pregnant by a new student named George Barron—dutifully bought a third-class ticket and hurried to their side, much to Dorothy’s displeasure. Crowley recorded one late-night episode in his diary:
A single drink of rum (on top of a good deal of mental worry during the day) was enough to induce in Dorothy Olsen an attack of acute mania. Lying in bed, close cuddled, I nearly asleep, she suddenly started to scratch my face without the least warning, with a spat of the filthiest incoherent abuse of me and everyone connected with me.82
Leah’s services became unnecessary, however, for Dorothy miscarried, and they all returned to Paris.
Leah found herself alone again, but friends like Gérard Aumont, Aimée Gouraud, and George Barron helped her keep her head together. Her will to die subsided in favor of a new vitality as she came to terms with life with and without Crowley. Giving herself over to anger, she wrote to Sir Aleister Crowley, “The Sir means as little to me as ‘Lord’ Beaverbrook—Aleister is a mere wish phantasm.… You are no more a Magus than you are a cunt. You seem to disregard all Holy Books etc. in your sexual stupidity.”83 In the end, she discovered the detachment to distinguish between Crowley the prophet—a vehicle of the divine word that she most fervently accepted—and Crowley the man, who was capable of inexplicable coldness. “I do in the main consider him merely a Word, but it’s damn hard when one has to have ‘human’ dealings with what appears to be the rottenest kind of creature, to think of it as an Idea.”84
Meanwhile at Cefalù, Ninette’s next child, Richard, was born; while la Calce did not evict her on January 1 as threatened, the possibility loomed constantly. As Leah wrote, “Ninette is threatened with expatriation: where that is to I am sure I don’t know. Is she American or French? Evidently her birth certificate and passport are among the Customs’ spoils. Great collection, that!”85
The Thelemites gathered again in June 1925, more motley and desperate than ever. Drab Leah had learned simultaneously to admire and dislike Crowley. Dorothy—who, like so many of Crowley’s lovers, drank heavily—was suspicious and jealous of the former Scarlet Woman. And Mudd, who’d been homeless and hungry in London, believed Crowley to be straying farther and farther from the obligation given him by the Secret Chiefs in The Book of the Law. All they had in common was their mission to spread the word.
Bringing them together was the Conference of Grand Masters being held in the secluded twelfth-century German city of Weida, Thuringia. Heinrich Tränker (1880–1956), head of OTO’s German branch as Frater Recnartus and founder of his own organization the Collegium Pansophicum (or Pansophical Lodge), was hosting this convocation of chiefs of major occult organizations for the summer solstice. The only snag in the plan was that OTO currently had no leader: Reuss, the Outer Head of the Order, had died in 1923, and the remaining administrative heads (X°) needed to elect a new Frater Superior. Crowley reasonably expected the honor would fall to him: not only had he students acting as X° in America, Africa, and Australia, but Tränker had a vision of Crowley leading OTO, which convinced him that Baphomet was the intended successor. In response to Tränker’s vision, Crowley had American student Max Schneider translate The Book of the Law into German and send it ahead. When Tränker read the manuscript, he concluded it was demonically inspired; yet before he could condemn it too strongly, another vision cleared up everything and restored his faith. In a letter to Tränker, Crowley wrote, “Frater Peregrinus [Reuss] in the last letters that we exchanged definitely designated me to succeed him.”86 Similarly, he wrote to C. S. Jones:
I now feel at liberty to inform you that in the O.H.O.’s [Outer Head of the Order] last letter to me he invited me to become his successor as O.H.O. and Frater Superior of the Order and my reply definitely accepted. I cannot give the exact dates of these letters, and cannot be sure that he died before receiving my reply.87
No records survive to document Reuss’s nomination of Crowley, but one observer noted, “The only fact that we know is that Reuss died and the above two elected AC as O.H.O.”88
On June 21, Crowley arrived at the home of the man who paid their fares to Germany. Frater Saturnus, known in the mundane world as Karl Germer (1885–1962), was Tränker’s personal secretary. University educated, he received first- and second-class Iron Crosses during the Great War for “special services,” probably spying. Germer and Tränker were both members of the Pansophical Society. In 1923, Germer sold his Vienna property and founded the publishing house Pansophia Verlag in Munich. Tränker was general editor, Pansophist Otto Wilhelm Barth89 oversaw sales, and Germer did translations and put up the capital. By the end of 1924, Germer began thinking about publishing Crowley translations exclusively, although he had never met him.
Soon thereafter, Crowley met the remaining Grand Masters. Albin Grau (1884–1942), known by the magical name Pacitus, had been Master of the Chair in Tränker’s Pansophical Lodge, the first Grand Master of Fraternitas Saturni, and a member of Crowley’s AA. A painter, he worked as a set designer, art director, and costume designer on UFA Studios silent films such as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s (1888–1931) classic unauthorized Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu—Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu—A Symphony of Horror, 1922).90 Other films utilizing Grau’s talents included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Warning Shadows (1922), and The Nibelungs (1924).
Eugen Grosche (1888–1964) ran an antiquarian and occult bookstore in Berlin. Grosche’s mother had been housekeeper of Berlin’s TS, and when Tränker supplanted Rudolf Steiner as secretary in 1921, he also tapped Grosche to establish a Berlin lodge of the Pansophical Society. This he did under the magical name Gregor A. Gregorius.
Dr. Henri Clemens Birven (1883–1969), despite an apparently French ancestry, was born in Aachen, Germany. Although he studied philosophy in Berlin—even writing a dissertation on Kant—professionally he lectured on electrical engineering. Finding himself a prisoner of Russia during the Great War, he escaped through China and ultimately returned to Berlin, where he taught at the Humboldtschule Tegel, one of Berlin’s top secondary schools. By 1927 he would begin publishing the occult journal Hain der Isis (Veil of Isis), which would include some of Crowley’s writings.
Martha Küntzel (1857–1941), occultist and devoted student of Thelema, was known affectionately to Crowley as “Little Sister.” Küntzel and her lover, Pansophical Lodge and OTO member Otto Gebhardi, had been involved in the TS. However, the Law of Thelema proved to be Küntzel’s path, which she followed with the utmost devotion.
Germer’s friend Oskar Hopfer was a Thuringian publisher and technical artist who helped Crowley devise a new 777, which placed correspondences on the appropriate sphere or path of a drawing of the Tree of Life in favor of a tabular listing. He was probably also the one to publish Ein Zeugnis der Suchenden, or “The Testament of a Seeker.” Penned by Crowley with help from Mudd and Tränker, it was another anti-Theosophical broadsheet that proclaimed the Master Therion to be the new World Teacher.
These eight—Tränker, Germer, Grau, Grosche, Birven, Küntzel, Hopfer, and Crowley—made up the conference, which ironically took place in the nation from which, a year previously, anthroposophist and former OTO member Rudolph Steiner was driven by Nazi persecution. The conference’s unfolding revolved around the Masters’ mixed feelings about Crowley. While Germer, Tränker, Küntzel, and Grosche hailed him eagerly,
his irresponsible references to the IX° in his writings angered the others; Grau disliked The Book of the Law and renounced Ein Zeugnis. A debate split the Masters on this issue, and a heated and bitter argument between Crowley and Tränker drove the wedge deeper. In the end, Grau, Hopfer, and Birven sided with Tränker, who, as cosignatory of Ein Zeugnis, repudiated the document. Mudd appealed to Grau’s AA membership in an effort to win his support, but the politics proved terminal. The Masters split into three camps: those who sided with Tränker in rejecting Crowley’s teachings; moderates like Grosche, who regarded Crowley a teacher and incorporated Thelema into his philosophy but nevertheless rejected him as OHO; and finally, Karl Germer and the others, who accepted Crowley as Frater Superior.
The schism destroyed the Pansophical Lodge, which would ritually close and dissolve on Maundy Thursday 1926; neither Tränker nor Grau were heard from again. On May 8, 1926, Grosche founded the Fraternitas Saturni, a magical brotherhood that accepted Thelema but remained independent of the Master Therion. A third of the Pansophists flocked to this new organization, which in 1928 began publishing its own magical papers and the journal Saturn Gnosis. With the subsequent collapse of Pansophia Verlag, in 1927 Germer would establish a press devoted to Crowley’s writings: Thelema Verlag.
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