The differences of opinion that split OTO into different factions that summer soon split apart the magical family Crowley had built around himself.
That August of 1925, the subtle conflict between Crowley and C. S. Jones came to a head. Although Jones had endorsed Crowley as OHO, Crowley found his increasingly unorthodox books on the kabbalah intolerable. When Jones was unable to account for book sales in Detroit, Crowley grew suspicious, suspended Jones’s officer status in OTO, and placed Max Schneider in charge of his personal stock. Schneider arrived in Detroit to find two trunks of Crowley’s rariora gone. The difference between them—Jones protesting his innocence, and Crowley believing himself robbed—would never be resolved. Not until the 1950s would it be discovered that the books were not stolen by Achad but lost track of in a Detroit warehouse.
Jones continued on his own eccentric path. Around 1930 he became Mahaguru (head) of an organization called the Universal Brotherhood, which he had joined after moving to Chicago. Around this same time, he converted to Catholicism in an effort to introduce English papists to Thelema. Finally, in his paper The Teachings of the New Aeon, he attacked Crowley and Thelema:
The Beast may be considered as his own worst enemy, but Aiwaz is quite evidently the enemy of mankind, and should be recognized as such, if this new system, deliberately calculated to bring about the self-destruction of the human race, is to be rightly evaluated.91
His expulsion from OTO followed shortly thereafter.
Leah and Mudd left Weida to live with Martha Küntzel and Otto Gebhardi in their small abode. On December 4, 1925, Leah gave birth to Barron’s son. Although the father had left her high and dry, she was indifferent, naming the baby Al after the god name that was the key to The Book of the Law. His nickname was Bubby. Although Alostrael lived up to Thelemic principles, Crowley grew distrustful of her and her self-determined title of Babalon. He finally eliminated her by instructing all OTO members to shun her as a “center of pestilence” per the Short Comment to Liber AL. Disgusted, Leah renounced both the Beast and her title on December 26, 1929. She returned to America to be with Alma and Hansi and to resume her job as a schoolteacher. She died at Meringen, Switzerland, on February 22, 1975.
Mudd’s story is even more bizarre. Late in 1925 he concluded Crowley had completely failed his commission from the Secret Chiefs and was no better than a false prophet. Mudd declared himself, as the only person to understand The Book of the Law, the World Teacher. Küntzel called him a saboteur and threw him out of her house. Crowley would eventually banish him from the order. Mudd returned to his father on the Isle of Man and on February 24, 1926, formally withdrew his signature from Ein Zeugnis der Suchenden. In a 1927 letter to Jane Wolfe, he wrote, “I have dropped all interest in anything that calls itself magick and any kind of work that insists on a capital W.”92 On September 6, 1930, he and Leah sent Crowley a letter renouncing their magical oaths; then he faded from the scene altogether. On May 6, 1934, at about age forty-five, he took a room at 220 Arling Road in Guernsey, an English Channel Island. A month later, he bicycle-clipped his pant-cuffs, filled his trousers and pockets with stones, and waded into the English Channel. The hotel proprietor reported Mudd missing on June 16, and the police recovered his body from Portlet Bay around noon that same day. “I feel sure that he must have left a long, elaborate mathematical proof as to why he had to do this,” Crowley later remarked.93 One of the greatest and eeriest ironies of Crowley’s corpus is that The Winged Beetle (1910), published just after Mudd first entered Crowley’s circle, contains a poem dedicated to him; it is titled “The Swimmer.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The French Connection
Around November 1925, Crowley left Weida and began working on his incisive and inspirational Little Essays Toward Truth. After a bout of ptomaine laid him up in Marseilles, he attended a party and met Ernest Hemingway, who described him simply as “a tall, gray, lantern-jawed man.”1 In January 1926, Crowley settled into a villa at La Marsa, Tunis. Jane Wolfe joined him for five months at the beginning of February. At this time, Crowley was also corresponding with a young Tom Driberg (1905–1976), who, at age twenty, was more concerned about finding an artificial stimulant to help him pass his exams than about the Labour Party for which he would later become a member of Parliament.2 Crowley invited him to Tunis and later to Paris, but their acquaintance was largely confined to correspondence.
While Crowley was in Tunis, Karl Germer took his wife, Maria, on a trip to the Abbey of Thelema. On January 10, 1926, Ninette received them in the empty shell that was once the stronghold of Thelema. Dirty and dilapidated, just about everything had been sold off. The living conditions appalled Germer. Although he stayed at the Abbey until at least February, he joined Crowley in Tunis that April, describing bluntly and exactly the conditions at the Abbey. Although this convinced AC that Lulu, now five years old, should come to Tunis for proper care and education, repeated complications and miscommunications prevented it.
The positive reception of the Mediterranean Manifesto, coupled with the realization that publicity was the key to putting over the Great Work, encouraged Crowley to spend much of 1926 absorbed in his “World Teacher” campaign. “The Only way of getting proper publicity is to arrange for the World Teacher campaign,” Crowley wrote, hoping Evans or someone else with journalistic connections would pick it up. This World Teacher campaign sought to use as its springboard the publicity that Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater of the TS prepared to introduce the world to Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), the boy they had groomed to be the next messiah. Theosophy based its concept of the World Teacher on the Buddhist Maitreya, a future bodhisattva or enlightened being, which Leadbeater equated with Christ. Leadbeater discovered Krishnamurti as a young teenager on the beach of the TS headquarters at Adyar in 1909. Declaring him the vessel for the expected World Teacher, Leadbeater and Besant adopted him and began preparing him for this role. In 1911 the Theosophists founded the Order of the Star in the East to prepare for the World Teacher’s arrival, and in 1926, Krishnamurti began a lecture tour of the United States as this World Teacher. Crowley planned to use the TS’s propaganda to declare himself, not Krishnamurti, the World Teacher. “If this is done as it should be, there is bound to be a big scrap with unlimited stories of excellent news value.”3 Thus, AC wrote defiantly to Montgomery Evans, “The World Teacher informs the public that Doctor Annie Besant is in error when she states that He will manifest through Mr. Krishnamurti in December, or at any other time.”4 Characteristically, Crowley was full of unkind opinions:
About Krishnamurti: There is no objection on my part to pæderasty as such. This is a totally different matter. It is the question of the following practice, which I class as black magical because it is unnecessary, uneconomical from the magical standpoint, and likely to arouse highly undesirable forces as being in opposition to the Law of Thelema.5
On H. P. Blavatsky’s successor, Crowley called Besant “totally devoid of all spiritual greatness, as of moral decency.”6
The TS was naturally on Crowley’s radar as it influenced every occultist contemporary with Crowley, from Westcott and the rest of the GD to his own students, like Frank Bennett. As strongly as Crowley admired its founder, H. P. Blavatsky, he disliked just as strongly, if not more so, her successors. When Annie Besant introduced Co-Masonry to England in connection with the TS in 1902, Crowley was outraged. This reaction was only exacerbated when Yarker, in his last years, befriended not only Crowley (and thereby OTO) but also Co-Masonry, contributing to its journal and receiving an extensive obituary;7 likewise when Co-Mason J. I. Wedgwood attended the first meeting to elect Yarker’s successor.8 When Crowley prepared his commented edition of Blavatsky’s Voice of the Silence as the supplement to the blue Equinox, he expected it not only to send tremors through the TS, but to “have the San Francisco earthquake looking like 30¢.”9 Indeed, at that time Crowley went so far as to draft a manifesto to the TS, declaring himself Blavatsky’s successor; seeking to t
urn weakness into strength, Crowley even argued (unconvincingly) in his document, “The fact that he has never compromised himself with any branch of the T.S. is highly significant.”10 Thus Crowley’s current campaign was an expression of his long-standing ideas regarding Theosophy.
Mudd, who was still collaborating with Crowley at this time, would sneak into London’s TS headquarters and pin the Mediterranean Manifesto to their bulletin board. Crowley followed it up with several other broadsheets swiping at the TS. “The World Teacher to the Theosophical Society” read:
The World-Teacher sayeth:
Find, each of you, your own true Way in the Universe, and follow it with eager joy!
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt!
Do that, and no other shall say nay.
Greeting and Peace!
ANKH-F-N-KHONSU,
the Priest of the Princes.
Next, “The Avenger to the Theosophical Society” was more to the point:
You have done well to protest against the grotesque mummeries of the bottle-fed Messiah; you will still do wisely to beware of its Jesuitical wire-pullers. The attempted usurpation is most sinister Black Magic of the Brothers of the Left-hand Path.
I need not remind you of the shameless and nauseating fraud by which the Grand Old Procuress worked herself into the presidency of your Society, of her blatant attempts to capture various rites of Freemasonry, and her imbecile parodies of the Romish heresy, of the obscene manusturpations practised by Leadbeater on the wretched Krishnamurti, with a view of making him a docile imbecile, in imitation of the traditions of the Dalai Lamas, or of a thousand other duplicities, tergiversations, and crimes. It is your daily shame to remember.
April 1926 saw Driberg distributing these broadsheets for Crowley.
If, as Dorothy Olsen reported, “At last this World Teacher business seems to have caught fire everywhere and we are being interviewed by newspapers and the newspapers seem to be taking it up as quite important news,”11 they must have been incidental presses since no articles survive among Crowley’s papers. In the end, the campaign fizzled like many of AC’s other grand schemes. Likewise Krishnamurti, it turns out, was uninterested in his spiritual calling, declaring he was not the World Teacher and precipitating an embarrassing crisis for the TS.
Crowley published a most rare edition of The Book of the Law on April 9, the twenty-second anniversary of the writing of its second chapter. It consisted of photographic reproductions of the original sixty-five handwritten pages, housed as loose sheets in a maroon leather box; the title leaf was printed in red and black ink on handmade paper. He printed only eleven copies of this work, the first eight being presentation copies for Crowley, Dorothy, Leah, Jane, Karl, C. S. Jones, Otto Gebhardi, and student Dorothea Walker. Only three copies were for sale, one for each of three countries at £93, $418, and 2,542 reichsmarks.12 Leah returned her copy of the book along with a scathing letter:
I therefore return Copy No. 2 of your Book, signifying thereby that I revoke all my recognition of you heretofore as Beast, or Priest of the Princes, or as having any authority whatsoever in respect of the Law of Thelema.13
Karl Germer, who received the unenviable job of selling the American edition of the book, emigrated to the United States with his wife, Maria, on June 12. He checked Crowley’s book stock in Detroit, confirming it was missing. Achad had taken a larger trunk of books to sell in Chicago, but the whereabouts of the second remained unknown. “Achad never handed over the storage checks for us to go seriously into the matter,” Germer recalled.14 So he got a job, cut back expenses, and sent Crowley the better part of his income to keep the Great Work going: of his $190 monthly salary, he sent Crowley $100.
Although Crowley bought a magical dagger to banish malignant forces and impediments, turmoil nevertheless dogged him. Six days after joining Dorothy and Jane in France that August, he had a major row with Dorothy. As Jane described it in her diary, “Dorothy went on a mad ranting, raving explosion last night which continued until 2:00 a.m.”15 Two days later, Crowley left for Bordeaux, realizing that Dorothy wasn’t his ideal Scarlet Woman after all. Although she remained his lover for a time, she left England on Crowley’s fifty-second birthday to continue the Great Work in Chicago.
Once again, Beast went on the prowl for a suitable sex-magical partner. He found many candidates, including one Louis Eugene de Cayenne. Crowley’s January 2, 1927, diary entry describes the extent of his quest: “Eugene and all his tribe disappeared, leaving me with nine mistresses in Paris.… I am now eliminating these one by one.”16 Alas, none of Crowley’s subsequent Scarlet Women would live up to the precedents set by seers like Rose Kelly, Mary Desti, and Roddie Minor, let alone the pillars of strength represented by Leila Waddell and Leah Hirsig.
The most promising contender for the role of Scarlet Woman at this time was K. Margaret Binetti. Crowley met her at the end of August, and despite his promiscuous sex magick couplings, they soon became engaged. Margaret lacked interest in magic and the philosophical rationale behind his infidelity, and this strained their relationship. Crowley soon reconsidered spending his life with the woman to whom he wrote “Lines on being seduced by Madame Binetti.”17 On February 6, 1927, he burned the talisman of Jupiter he had consecrated for her. “Her callous heartlessness and hypocritical falsity doom her to dire ends,”18 he recorded in his diary, then cast out his net once again.
In March 1927, Germer, now living in Boston, founded Thelema-Verlags-Gesellschaft to publish German translations of Crowley’s complete works as quickly as possible. Its cofounders included Gebhardi, Hopfer, and Küntzel. In quick succession, they published Book Four, The Heart of the Master, “The Three Schools of Magick,” and “The Message of the Master Therion.”
Despite the press’s promise, this was otherwise a time of failure for Crowley. Hopfer’s color, diagrammatic revision of 777 was a great idea but would cost an unreasonable $100 per copy. Similarly, plans for a book on the oracle of geomancy, to sell with a box painted in flashing colors and filled with holy sand from Mecca or Jerusalem, remained just an idea.
Finally, on March 9, a final nail sealed the coffin on Crowley’s Cefalù period. Ninette wrote a letter complaining of her seven years in Cefalù, “Thinking too much, making resolutions and taking oaths, keeping none, violating my better impulses, have worn my nerves to shreds.” Then she bid Jane and Beast “an eternal Adieu.”19 The Abbey’s financial situation was dire, and although he wired Ninette £500, Crowley realized his dream of a Thelemic community was a lost cause. The best plan was to get Ninette and the children back to France and cut their losses.
Mrs. Kasimira Bass learned of Crowley from Thelemite Wilfred T. Smith while living in California. She was born on February 10, 1887, in Lemberg, Austria (modern-day Lviv in western Ukraine), a historically Polish city that became part of Austria in 1772. With an eight-year-old daughter, Marian, from her previous marriage in Vienna, Kasimira de Helleparth emigrated to the United States aboard the SS Majestic, arriving in New York on December 12, 1922. Three days later she married John F. Bass Jr. in Cleveland, Ohio. The fact that she settled in Glendale, California, in December 1923 while her husband lived in Chicago suggests that the marriage may have been arranged to help her obtain citizenship.20 While living in Southern California she met Smith, and while traveling in Europe she stopped in France to meet Crowley.
AC took her to dinner and, to her surprise, proposed. Four times. He wanted to marry her in Paris the next day. She was too stunned to answer. The next day, having met her daughter Marian, he proposed again. This time, she explained she had to return to Poland (her birthplace had reverted from Austrian back to Polish rule from 1918 to 1939), but promised to return. Crowley wrote to Smith, “I thank you for the galleon of treasure which came under full sail into port here last week. Unfortunately, she has chartered to make more distant shores.”21 Nevertheless, he hoped to take her to Egypt, where he had had such stunning magical success with Rose.
On Octobe
r 1, Jane Wolfe, the last remaining member of the Cefalù community, sailed for New York. Crowley was sad to see her go, but she would carry on the Great Work in America with Dorothy and Karl, and supervise students Max and Leota Schneider and W. T. Smith in California. She hoped to return to acting, but would soon find herself blacklisted for her connection to the notorious Aleister Crowley; after returning to Hollywood, she would have a role in only one other film, Under Strange Flags (1937).
Gerald Joseph Yorke (1901–1983) stood in the Paris airport on New Year’s Eve 1927, waiting to meet Aleister Crowley. He was born two months prematurely in 1901, the second of three sons to landowner and industrialist Vincent Wodehouse Yorke (1869–1957) and Hon. Maud Evelyn Wyndham (1874–1963), daughter of Henry Wyndham, the second Baron Leconfield.22 Attending Eton and graduating with distinction from Cambridge, he had played cricket for Gloucestershire in 1925, making a first-class appearance in a game that season against Glamorgan.23 His youngest brother, Henry Vincent (1905–1973), was an aspiring writer, his first novel Blindness (1926) having appeared the previous year; he would go on to renown under the pen name Henry Green, his sixth book Loving (1945) making Time magazine’s list of the “100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005.”24
After graduation, Gerald began to study The Equinox and Crowley’s other magical writings. He was bright enough to distrust the rumors circulating about Crowley and judge the man for himself, so he contacted Crowley through J. G. Bayley and received an invitation to meet the Master in Paris. What he encountered impressed him immensely: Crowley struck Yorke as a brilliant and talented man with tremendous unrealized potential. His unpublished manuscripts testified to the many important lessons Crowley still had to teach the world … he only lacked a business manager to make a success of his work. Crowley took Yorke’s enthusiasm as an offer and accepted. While The Book of the Law prophesied a rich man from the west, he found instead a benefactor from Germany and a rich boy from Gloucestershire.
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